The Journey to Pregnancy.

I know some of you are curious to hear the entire story on how the Twins came to be, so I figured I'd start a blog and tell my tale of getting pregnant as well as document my pregnancy and life! Be forewarned I suck at this kind of thing, so if its horrible I am sorry, however I hope you all enjoy! 

 Getting Pregnant did not come easy, nor was it fun. It took us a long time, a lot of money, and a lot of doctors but we are finally here! To get into details on how we ended up doing Invitro Fertilization (IVF) we have to go back to the very beginning. 

 When I fell in love with Daniel 4 years ago, I knew I wanted to have babies with him. He had a vasectomy done after his divorce a few years earlier but ensured me that it could easily be reversed, I didn't know anything about vasectomy reversal and so of course I was fine with the idea and married him a few months later (although the kids idea probably would not have been a relationship breaker for me). Anyway so this was 2011, let's move to 2013.

 We (with a lot of convincing on my side) decided that we would finally have Daniels Vasectomy reversed and start trying for babies. In March 2013 we finally had enough money for the surgery (seriously it's not cheap, I highly recommend being 100% certain you are done having kids before getting fixed! a reversal runs around $5,000 right now). So we scheduled his surgery and he got un-fixed. I was so excited when the doctor came out and told me he was able to put both sides back together and everything looked great! This was it, it was my turn to finally be a Mom! 

 A few months after his reversal surgery Daniel had to go in for a semen analysis to see how much sperm he was producing and check the quality of it, pretty normal stuff. The results came back.....there was no sperm. His reversal did not work. I was crushed, I put my husband through that long surgery for nothing! Now what the hell were we supposed to do?

 Fast forward about 6 months, I had no idea what we were going to do to have a baby, we spent all this money trying to reverse his vasectomy, there was no way I could afford any more treatments for a long time! One day at work I was talking to one if my cute coworkers, we somehow got onto the subject of infertility and she advised me that our health insurance covers infertility treatments! I was so excited, so naturally we immediately made an appointment with the Utah Fertility Center to get this process started, this was in October 2013. Unfortunately I learned I was on the wrong insurance plan, and so we couldn't really get started until January. 

 January 2014, the start of IVF. After our Doctors reviewed both mine and Daniel's situation they figured this was going to be easy peasy. We'd both had children in the past, we were still young and healthy, the only trial they could see what Daniels Vasectomy reversal failed and so we just needed to extract sperm another way. Everything for me checked out fine, and so I started the IVF process right away. I will tell you, that IVF sucks, I hated almost every minute of the process, I'm so glad its over! 

 During IVF you take a million different kinds of medicine, sometimes I didn't even understand why I was taking what I was taking (ex. Birth Control Pills, like what?) but I did what they told me to and didn't ask too many questions. So anyway ill break down the different medicines I had and what they were for (at least from my understanding). 

 Birth Control Pills - this helps them control your menstrual cycle, basically you have a period when they want you to have one. 
Antibiotics - kind of obvious, but its to get all yucky-ness out of your body before the embryo transfer. 
Injectables- I wish I could remember the names of the different shots I had to do, but giving myself a shot in my stomach every morning was not fun and isn't really something I wanted to remember having to do. So yes, I gave myself a shot in my belly every morning, and sometimes at night. One of the medicines was making my eggs bigger so it was easier to retrieve them, the other was making my uterine lining thicken so when they put the eggs back in my uterus was ready for them. 

 There was a couple of other things involved, but for the most part that was it.

 Once my body was all ready to go, we scheduled my egg retrieval & Daniels sperm retrieval for sometime in Mid-Feburary, both the same day. I went first and after they were done with me, Daniel's procedure should have been really quick and we would be done. For the egg retrieval they put me under general anesthetic so I don't remember anything, as I was waiting for Daniel to get done I started to worry with how long it was taking, we were told it would only be like 20 minutes, it had been over an hour! 

 Finally Daniels doctor came in to talk to me, he told me that they poked a needle in him 6 times (3 on each side) and collected exactly 0 sperm and they could not figure out why. I was crushed! I immediately started crying, this was it, my husband is broken and the doctors don't know what to do! This day was terrible, it was one of the worst days of my life, I was told my husband was sterile and I might have to use a sperm donor to have children. This was seriously so heartbreaking for us. They froze my eggs that day and decided to refer us to another Doctor up at the U who specialized in male infertility in hopes he could help.

 July 2014, Daniel had been given Chlomed by his doctor at the U to help increase his testosterone and hopefully force his body to start making sperm. In July we scheduled a testicular biopsy for Daniel, I'm pretty sure its as painful as it sounds, but Daniel won't admit to being in pain. Anyway, his doctor had to put Daniel under general anesthetic this time and actually went in and cut out a piece of his testie. 

Daniel prepping for 2nd surgery

 I got the call from the Doctor after the surgery and he told me.....there is sperm! Lots of it! I didn't know whether to start jumping up and down or start crying! I was so excited that we could finally move onto the next step! The lab director from the Utah Fertility center was up at the U Surgery Center during the surgery, he took Daniel's sperm and brought it down to the Utah Fertility Center labs. They unthawed and fertilized my eggs that day! 7 eggs were fertilized, 5 took. After 3 days we only had 3 eggs left, and on day 5 there was 1 really good one and 2 kind of eh ones. They froze 1 egg on day 5, and the 2 eh ones made it to day 6 and were frozen (these are the 2 that are now babies growing in my belly). 

Embryos Transferred

 August 2014, I started into a Frozen IVF cycle, this one was MUCH different than the fresh cycle, in some ways it was better and in others it was worse. Reasons it was better: I only had to go to the doctors office like once every 2 weeks instead of 2x/week or so. The medicine however SUCKED! This time I got a shot in my bum every single morning, and on 2 nights/week. Daniel had to do these for me for obvious reasons, he hated doing them and I hated getting them. The shots started in August, the embryo Transfer was August 28th and I stopped the shots October 15th. So as you can see, I had to do them for a long long time!

Pregnant :D

 September 4, 2014, I had a pregnancy blood draw scheduled in a few days, but I was far too anxious to wait so naturally I went and bought a home pregnancy test and took it....it was Positive! I wanted to cry and scream and dance around all at the same time, all this work had FINALLY paid off! I was FINALLY pregnant! We had the blood test the next week to confirm the pregnancy, and an ultrasound a couple of weeks later in which time we learned that both the embryos we transferred took and we are having TWINS!!! 

 Daniel and myself are so excited to be parents (again for him). I will create more blog posts with pregnancy updates, announcements, etc. But in the meantime, let me know what you guys think.