I'm going to be honest and say that yesterday was a terrible day for me. I just felt so low about the whole thing. I snapped at my hubby and then cried my eyes out. I really don't like what this process is doing to me, sometimes I can be such a bitch. I just feel like a total failure and this whole thing just hurts so much. For as long as I can remember I've wanted so much to be a mommy, and when we started our TTC journey I never imagined that at this point I wouldn't be pregnant. We know when I ovulate and we time things well every single cycle. I can't help but think there's something wrong, you know? I'm 28 and my hubby is 30. We don't have any medical issues as far as we know. We don't smoke, we hardly ever drink (we might have a couple of glasses of wine right at the beginning of my cycle when I don't temp, but that's it). I've been taking Mucinex for a few months around my fertile time to improve my cervical mucus and we started using Pre-Seed this cycle. We're going to join a gym today and we'll aim to go 3 times a week. Other than that I don't know what else we can really do to improve our chances.
Anyway, my hubby has made an appointment with his doctor for next week to get a referral for a semen analysis. It seems like the obvious thing to do, since it's non-invasive. I'll obviously need to get tested too, but at least if we know there are no sperm issues that's a start. Of course the SA could come back with bad results, but if that's the case we'd be better off knowing. If he's sterile (which I doubt, but who knows right?) then I can stop this crazy cycle of ups and downs. I'd be able to stop charting and all of that, because really what would be the point in that case? I honestly believe if either of us has a fertility issue it will be something wrong with me rather than him, but at least the SA will shed some light on things. There's every chance it'll come back great, and I really hope it does. We're both as prepared as we can be that it might not, though.
We've already discussed what our options might be if his SA is awful, and decided that we probably wouldn't want to use donor sperm if it came down to that. I just don't think I'd be comfortable with it. I think I'm mostly worried that my hubby wouldn't be able to handle it if I was pregnant and it technically wasn't his baby. Plus, I really want for us to have a baby that's part of us both.
If it transpires that IVF is our only option, I don't know what we'll do. We can't afford it (it costs approx. $16,000 per cycle, maybe even more). My issue with IVF is this: when do you stop? Wouldn't you just feel like "maybe the next cycle will work"? You'd have invested so much emotionally and financially, that you might not want to stop until you ended up with a baby. That could end up costing more than our house! Like I said, we couldn't really afford it anyway. If it was 100% guaranteed, then we'd probably make it work. Sadly, the odds are generally much lower than that.
We've talked about adoption and I did a little bit of research yesterday, but it sounds quite daunting. Apparently for every healthy baby up for adoption in the US, there are 40 couples waiting to adopt. Yikes. It can also cost up to $40,000, which is beyond our reach. The website I looked at tried to make the cost seem better by saying something along the lines of "any method of having a baby costs money - hospital bills etc." While this is true, there's this thing called insurance and ours covers virtually everything pregnancy and delivery related. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't cover anything to do with adoption! Plus, adoption opens a whole other can of worms. Some people who were adopted don't have a problem with it, while others have a whole host of issues because of it.
I know I'm getting way ahead of myself here: as far as we know, neither of us have any fertility problems. If one (or both) of us are found to have issues, they might be easily treated. There's a good chance we'll never need to consider IVF or adoption. I guess I just need to get my thoughts out at the moment!
I think joining the gym will do us both good, it'll be a great outlet for our frustrations. Back in the UK I loved going to the gym: I'd go 4 or 5 times a week. It helped - at that time, hubby (then fiancé) and I were more than 5,000 miles apart and it kept me busy.
I sometimes feel as though my hubby doesn't feel the way I do about our lack of pregnancy, but after talking to him last night I think it's just that he's better at hiding his feelings than I am. He's probably almost as disappointed as I am about the whole thing, but he doesn't get emotional like I do. I get it, in some ways it's not so real for men as it is for women. He's not the one having awful periods, feeling like everyone else is pregnant, charting, taking 2 different vitamins every day, taking Mucinex, using Pre-Seed, monitoring potential symptoms, taking pregnancy tests, etc. There's a quote out there that says something like this: a woman becomes a mother as soon as she finds out she's pregnant; men become fathers when the baby is born. There may be some truth to that, because it's not the guy who experiences pregnancy first-hand.
I really want the whole package - I want to be pregnant and experience the whole thing. I know it's not glamorous, and sometimes pregnancy is downright uncomfortable and annoying. I want to have that, though: to know our baby is growing in my tummy, to go to scans and see the baby on the screen, to give birth... all of it. I really hope it'll happen for us soon.
