When you are a teenager with raging hormones, most of the sex education you get is geared more at abstinence rather than safer sex practices. You can’t get pregnant or get a disease if you don’t have sex! Yet, biologically, this is the perfect time for female bodies to reproduce. When you get older and find someone you want to share your life with, you naturally start to think, hmm… maybe now is a good time to start a family. You share excitedly with select friends and family that you have decided you’re going to start “trying.” Maybe you have special date nights or buy accessories to help set the mood. You share excited giggles with your partner over how much fun it will be to “try.”
A few months go by and nothing has changed. No matter you think, it will happen when it will happen. You decide to look into learning more your cycle and maybe even buy the book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility. You change you diet, work out a little bit more or take the workouts down a notch. You tell your partner to start wear boxers and start ix-naying wine at dinner. At your doctor’s appointment, you casually mention that you are trying to start a family but haven’t had any success yet. Your doctor gives your file another look and tells you to come back in a year, if nothing still and to relax.
Relax?? How am I supposed to relax? Trying to get pregnant and start our family is supposed to be fun! I’m a grown responsible woman with the means to support a child!! WHY AM I NOT PREGNANT YET?!?!
Your family and friends start asking when you will have a baby. You get comments like, “Oh, you must want to focus on your career first, rather than start a family.” Or maybe even a, “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you pregnant yet? Or is there something wrong with your husband?” Then the helpful hints start to come in.
“Tilt your hips up afterwards and don’t move.”
“You need to cut out wine/dairy/wheat/meat. That’s your problem.”
“Have you tried XYZ position? Guaranteed to get you pregnant!”
“Just relax, you’re probably trying too hard!”
It’s really hard to hear all those messages, when you are trying to understand and figure out why it is that you are not getting pregnant. It’s even more frustrating when you realize that even if you do have health insurance, it doesn’t cover infertility. The tests alone are expensive, just to understand what is going on with your body. It hasn’t even touched upon any needed procedures to increase the chances of pregnancy!
And sometimes, the challenge is NOT that you are unable to get pregnant, but rather, you have trouble STAYING pregnant. That for whatever reason, the fertilized egg and implantation do not go as expected, eventhough you receive a positive pregnancy test. You get your beta levels tested and everything seems to be going great, with levels increasing as they should. But for whatever reason, the pregnancy does not stick and you end up miscarrying.
Miscarriages are more common than you realize. According to the American Pregnancy Association website, “Studies reveal that anywhere from 10-25% of all clinically recognized pregnancies will end in miscarriage. Chemical pregnancies may account for 50-75% of all miscarriages.”
And according to Babycenter.com, “Studies have found that 30 to 50 percent of fertilized eggs are lost before or during the process of implantation – often so early that a woman goes on to get her period at about the expected time.”
For me, getting pregnant was not quick or easy. We studied the book, “Taking Charge of Your Fertility.” We created spreadsheets to track my cycle and changes in my body. I even purchased a “saliva microscope”. It can be depressing when you hear of everyone else around you and even celebrities all getting pregnant or getting ready to have a baby. You keep wondering, when will it be MY turn?