Adventures in Fertility, Part I

     When my husband Greg and I were little, we imagined getting married, having babies and living–you guessed it–happily ever after.  After all, that is what we heard about in stories.  That is what we saw around us.  We went to college and I went to graduate school and then walked down the aisle together.  We thought we would have a family as soon as we decided.  We could even pick the time of year of our baby’s birth.  Who wants to be bursting at the seems pregnant in the month of August?  We would have a boy and a girl and then decide if we wanted to have a third, based on how life was going for the four of us.    

     So, we returned from our honeymoon and commenced with starting our family a few months afterwards.  We wanted a few months of ‘us time’ as a married couple first.  Each month, we would wait expectantly and hope that Aunt Flow was not coming to visit our house.  But, each month, she arrived, bags packed, ready to unload.  Didn’t she see she was overstaying her welcome? 

     Perhaps we were doing something wrong.  We turned to ovulation kits.  They seemed pretty foolproof.  You read the stick and you are most likely to conceive in a given window of time.  So, it seemed, if you used this method, you were bound to have success.  Each month we followed the directions and anxiously bought pregnancy test after pregnancy test only to hear ‘Not Pregnant’ screaming out of the digital window.

     So, it was time to enlist the help of doctors.  We looked at our medical plan and scheduled a visit with the ObGyn.  She agreed that we had been trying long enough to start looking into what was going wrong.  We had every test imaginable.  Every test came back normal.  On the one hand, that was a relief….nothing was wrong.  On the other hand, we had no pregnancies…something was wrong.  We got the catch-all diagnosis of  ‘unexplained infertility.’