Welcome to my world

For more than half of my life now, I’ve had a strong suspicion I would be an infertile. I had good reason to believe so—at age 14, when I FINALLY got my period, she visited me for two months, then she went away. Poof. Like I had never reached womanhood at all. My worried mother took me to the OB/GYN, who promptly put me on birth control pills. Only she and my mom called them “hormone pills,” so I wouldn’t tune in to the fact that I essentially had a free pass to have as much sex as I wanted. It worked. Not that I had much of a choice—I didn’t have my first kiss until I was a freshman in college.

But I was no dummy. I knew that if one does not have a period, she does not ovulate. And if she does not ovulate, she does not conceive. As life went on, I became more and more concerned about my chances of having children. I asked new doctors, and they told me not to worry about it until I was ready to start a family. There were no tests that could determine whether I was reproductively challenged. One boyfriend even broke up with me because he wasn’t sure whether I would be able to have children, and he wanted his own biological progeny (there’s a real winner for you). After that break-up, I begged my doctors for tests and got them. They put me through the standard blood tests for PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), which came up negative, and told me I had nothing to worry about on that front. Ha.

It wasn’t until March of 2006, one year after marrying M (a wonderful guy who knew about my situation and wasn’t opposed to adoption, if that was what it took), that I went off the Pill for good and tested my luck. A friend who was experiencing secondary infertility became my Yoda and taught me how to temp. Lo and behold, I ovulated my first cycle, which was 40 days long. Then, nothing. I went to see a new OB that summer, who diagnosed me with PCOS (who knew it was a diagnosis of exclusion?), put me on Provera, thinking my body would trick itself into cycling normally. Nothing. That November, she put me through the traditional infertile work-up (bloodwork, HSG, etc.) and finally put me on Clomid. The short story: 1st cycle, 50 mg, didn’t make me ovulate. 2nd cycle, 100 mg, did work but I didn’t get pregnant. 3rd cycle, 100 mg, again I didn’t ovulate.

The statistics say that 80 percent of PCOS women are able to ovulate on Clomid. I’m proud and honored to be one of the unlucky 20 percent. I sought information on the Internet (gotta love the Google MD), and found a score of infertility blogs. I thought to myself, “Self, you’re a writer! Hell, you write for a living! Why shouldn’t you join this community of women bonded together by a single obsession—the desire for a child?”

And so begins my experiment. We’ll see where it leads us.