Zoe is Getting Demoted

We are prego and will be expecting a baby February 17, 2011!!

This announcement is 2 years in the making… However, the story starts 4 years ago. And since I don’t keep a journal I want to record it somewhere.

When I started medical school, I had no intention of having a baby until residency or maybe later. I didn’t think it was possible to have babies and go to medical school. However ,the beginning of 1st year of school there were 2 girls who were already pregnant, and they were not the only ones. I’ve had many classmates over the past 4 years have 1 sometimes 2 babies during school. It turns out the University of Minnesota is a wonderful medical school for women who want to have children. They are very flexible and work with your situation.  

There are many times in our lives when we make decisions based on spiritual promptings and we often don’t know why that is the correct choice for us. I know that one of the reasons why we were supposed to move out here for med school was so we would realize that we didn’t have to put off having children.  So John and I started talking about trying to get pregnant. For those of you who know me, know I’m a little bit of a control freak and like to plan everything. So I planned the perfect time to have a child. I scheduled my third year clinical rotations so that I would have the majority of my required rotations complete prior to having our baby. It was going to work perfectly. So June 2008 we started trying to make a baby. This may be TMI but I had been off of hormonal birth control for 2 years and have perfectly regular cycles so I didn’t think that conceiving would be very difficult. Ha! That was my first mistake.

June, July, August, and September passed with only negative pregnancy tests to show. My good friend Christina got married in October and I remember I was fertile that weekend so John and I left the wedding early but no such luck that month. November and December passed, again without success. My frustration was growing because I was doing everything perfectly. I knew it can take a while to get pregnant, but I was being exact and scientific about this. I knew the science behind conception and was doing everything by the book. Yet still no results. January came and my friend Christina, the one that got married in October, announced that she and her new husband were pregnant and got pregnant on their first try. I can honestly say I was so happy for her and so jealous at the same time. I was trying to get pregnant before she was even married and she was now pregnant. And I still had an empty uterus and multiple growing frustrations. I think January 2009 was one of the most difficult months in this process. I was taking my OBGYN clinical clerkship at this time which required me to spend time in the abortion clinic. Wow, talk about the wrong place for me to be at that time. I think I cried more that month than I had in a long time. And to top it off, if we didn’t get pregnant that month, we were going to have to take a break so I didn’t deliver during residency interviews the following fall. Well, January came and went without a positive pregnancy test. We tried for 2 more months before we took a break knowing I could push my interviews to the end of the interview season. Again no luck. I know Heavenly Father was teaching me a lesson on patience during this time

So my planning wasn’t going so well. But fortunately I had front loaded my schedule so I had a ton of time off at the end of 4th year… I had created the perfect maternity leave. Again, this seemed even more perfect than before. Yet, we hit another bump in the road as we were going to start trying again. I had some health problems in April and was told I had to put off trying to get pregnant until my problems resolved.  Again, more tears and frustrations were shed during this time.  I did however go through infertility work up during this time. John had a semen analysis which showed he had nothing short of Super Sperm. To quote my OBGYN, she had never seen a score as high as his. I think his super sperm thought they were so great that they were cocky and lazy. I had hormone tests and a hystersalpingogram, all normal. But my health was restored and I gave myself the go ahead to start trying again (doctors really do make the worst patients!) in July 2009. But the story didn’t change much from above. July, August, and September were again unsuccessful and I was officially infertile. The definition of infertility is the failure to conceive after a year of regular intercourse without contraception. And I felt like a failure. As a girl grows up, she never anticipates that she won’t be able to have children. We learn that Motherhood is the greatest job we can have yet I was failing at moving into this role.

I expected October to be the same as the prior months. But it wasn’t, it was different because we found out we were pregnant. You can imagine we were beyond excited. I still remember we were in New Orleans and we would be walking down the street and whisper, hey we’re pregnant! It was so exciting. We had been waiting and trying for so long. I went to my first OB appointment and it was so fun to pick up the packet of information on the Do’s and Don’ts of pregnancy and begin this process. Unfortunately a week later I started having spotting which turned into bleeding and cramping. Seriously? We finally get pregnant and then this happens… So, John and I went in for our first ultrasound together. As soon as they put the probe on, I saw a regular, empty uterus. I didn’t need her to point out that all the products of conception (such a cold, impersonal term) (aka my baby) had already passed out of my uterus, I already knew. Remember how I thought January had sucked? Yeah, this was way worse than that. Here is one lesson I learned, when your parents don’t know you are pregnant, don’t tell them you had a miscarriage by using the opening line, “So John and I got pregnant…” Because before you can break into the crappy part of the sentence about how you aren’t pregnant now, your mom starts to get excited about the pregnancy part. Then you have to burst out bawling and say, “Not anymore!” I know many of you have had miscarriages and some of you have had many. They are not fun. I just felt empty and nothing anyone could say could make me feel better. I even tried my scientific jargon about how “this percentage of pregnancies end in miscarriage” and  “chromosomal abnormalities are found in half of miscarriages” and blah blah blah. It didn’t work. But the best part about nobody knowing you are pregnant is you don’t have to tell people that you aren’t pregnant any more. So that made it a little easier not having to break the news to many people.

My cycle restarted in December and we were back in business. One upside from the whole October Incident was we got pregnant. We knew we could physically get pregnant which we had not known for the 16 months prior to that. So now the next step was getting pregnant again (and hoping it wouldn’t take another 16 months) and then staying pregnant. But we went back to our old ways and had nice, normal, regular periods every month like clockwork. In March I met with my OBGYN again to discuss options. I wanted to try clomid or something because I was getting impatient with waiting and felt like every month that passed was a missed opportunity. I had put off clomid because I was aware of the increased chance of multiples with this medication but my thoughts were 2 are better than none. A single baby during residency was going to be challenging so twins would be even more so. Again we did a bunch of tests but this time we found my progesterone was low. I was actually excited to find something wrong. Because if there is something wrong, then you can do something to fix it. So the plan was we would try progesterone for 3 cycles and if that was unsuccessful, we would move onto clomid.

May 2010 was the first month of the progesterone trial. I was tracking my cycle but I wasn’t ovulating when I usually do according to the ovulation predictor kit I was using. But John and I were still trying just in case. Then I went to Nebraska and had a positive ovulation. I was heartbroken because I was away from John during my peak fertility period and it was my fault we weren’t going to get pregnant that month. In June we went to Italy. The night we got home from our trip I took a pregnancy test because the progesterone would keep me from having my period so I had to take a test, confirm it was negative, then stop the progesterone. John was getting ready for bed as I sat on the toilet and peed on the stick. Usually, I put them aside and sometimes forget about them since they are always negative. However, immediately a faint line showed up. I know that there are many false negatives on UPTs but a false positive almost never occurs. We were pregnant. John didn’t believe me until he saw the line himself. I expected the test to be negative since we had missed my highly fertile period but it wasn’t. Two years after we initially started trying, we were finally pregnant.

Our next ultrasound was a much happier experience than the first. We went in together and as soon as she put the probe on, I saw that my uterus was not empty and inside was a baby with a beating heart. It was so cool to see John’s face. He had a huge permagrin. It was the greatest! But we were still wary. We were only 7 weeks in and miscarriages are common during the first trimester. However, we survived the first trimester and the baby was still alive and growing. We slowly started to tell family the exciting news. I still am nervous though. There are so many things that can go wrong in pregnancy that you are never safe.

So now we are almost 21 weeks into the pregnancy and I finally feel like I can make the announcement. I wasn’t expecting this to turn into the novel above but now I have it documented somewhere other than my brain. So if you are still reading, I’m beyond impressed that you are still awake! I am so grateful we were able to get pregnant. I have friends and patients who are unable to conceive. I know how frustrating these past couple years have been and can’t imagine what others have to go through. I’ll try to post updates but I’m not making any promises…