This week is National Infertility Awareness Week. As my husband and I have struggled with infertility, I thought I would blog about this often silent struggle and share our story. This will be the first of a mini blog series dealing with our journey of infertility, the birth of our daughter, and our continued struggle with infertility.
When we got married, my husband and I knew that we were going to go on the mission field. We chose to enjoy married life and wait to have kids until after we came back from the mission field, which was originally going to only be for one year. We left for Thailand before we had been married for 3 years. When we made the decision to stay in Thailand longer than one year, we decided that we would be open to having children outside of the US. So in January 2008 I stopped taking birth control and we began actively trying to get pregnant.
Our 1st Valentine’s Day in Thailand
When you first start trying there is an excitement and an expectation that you will get pregnant very soon. As the months pass by without getting pregnant, you begin to wonder why you aren’t pregnant yet. Is there a reason why you aren’t pregnant yet? Am I just over-stressing about it, or is something wrong?
After a year of trying we went to an infertility doctor to see if there were any problems. Now I don’t know the process if you go to an infertility clinic in the States, but in Thailand the doctor runs all the tests as quick as possible and without consulting or explaining what he is doing. So in not very long we had done blood tests, sperm counts, ultra sounds and some other tests. When the tests had all been run the doctor sat my husband and myself down and went over the facts.
The doctor looked at me and told me there weren’t any problems with my fertility but there was a problem with my husband’s fertility. There was a sign of infection in his white cell count and he has a very low sperm count. (When I first told my husband that I wanted to write this blog, I was going to keep the source of our infertility a secret to protect him. My husband wanted our story to be complete so he gave his permission for me to talk about his infertility.) That’s right, looking at and talking to me, even though my husband was in the room, our doctor delivered the difficult news to us, in a matter of fact tone. Our doctor then told us not to worry as I was still young (in my mid 20s) and we were good candidates for IUI’s and he thought we would get pregnant soon. We may have left that appointment with an action plan from our doctor, but inside we wondered if the doctor was right. Would we be able to get pregnant?
I think the hardest thing for me in finding out that we had an identified fertility issue was that it felt like the previous year had been a waste in trying to have children. How easy it would have been to clear up the infection in the beginning if we had only known. And yet we didn’t and only found out a year into the process. The hope was that once the infection was gone, then my husband’s sperm count would go up as well, but that didn’t happen. His sperm got healthier but still hovered just above extremely low sperm count.
With the doctor’s recommendation, we tried IUI to see if we could get pregnant with the sperm being condensed and having a shorter distance to swim. (The awesome part about living in Bangkok at this time was that each IUI cost us under two hundred US dollars.) After our first time, we reasoned that maybe we just needed to try again and that next time we would get pregnant. It was like our hope was renewed and we thought we would be pregnant soon. But after 4 IUI’s with no success, our hopes faded and we wondered if we would ever get pregnant. Our doctor’s initial and continued assurance that we would get pregnant through IUI only deepened the pain of not getting pregnant. We decided that we couldn’t keep getting our hopes up every month and that we needed to stop the fertility treatments after 6 months.
We didn’t stop trying to get pregnant and kept charting and doing what we could. Another year passed and despair had set in. It had been two and a half years and we had not ever gotten a positive pregnancy test. Would we ever get pregnant? Could we get even pregnant? It was comforting that we were working with college students mainly as they aren’t thinking about kids yet. They could help take our minds off of what we couldn’t have. But the pain and longing still remained, hidden deep inside.
We were set to go on a 3 month furlough were we would be traveling constantly to visit family, friends and speak in churches. While furloughs are refreshing to the soul, the pace is often physically tiring. The longest time we spent in one location was 2 weeks for missionary meetings/ training with our organization. We were simply on the move a lot. As we looked at that time, my husband and I realized that trying to get pregnant during our furlough would be crazy, if not impossible. And, we were ready for a break and a pause. We talked and decided that we would take a 3 month break and then when we got back to Bangkok we would re-explore fertility treatments. We knew that that meant looking at IVF (which is also considerably cheaper in Thailand).
On our furlough- Mini vacation with family to the Grand Canyon
As we prepared to go back to Bangkok, God had a special surprise for us. Five days before we left we found out we were pregnant. Andy and I were both in shock and disbelief. How did we get pregnant, we wondered and asked ourselves. We had been travelling. We hadn’t done any of “the things” right. It wasn’t because we had just stopped worrying about it, as we had been quite busy in speaking and sharing about Thailand. The only possible answer is that God blessed us with a little miracle. This little miracle is now three years old and brings immense joy to our lives.
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