Love, Marriage, and...

There's a saying "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage".  My husband and I had the love part.  We had the marriage part.  Next, we wanted that baby carriage.

At this point we had been married around three years.  It seemed like a good time to expand the family, bring new life and joy into our home.  But something strange had happened to my body.

My menstrual cycles started off as normal as possible for a teenage girl.  But then Crohn's Disease happened and wreaked havoc on my body.  I had lost a lot of blood over time due to my illness that the "gift" had disappeared.  My body was doing good to pump enough blood to keep my heart going, I'm sure.  Functions that had to do with reproduction were not important.

After my issues with Crohn's were addressed, then my menstrual cycles (or lack there of) were addressed.  I was prescribed birth control to get my body to have cycles.  A woman's body is meant to have cycles once a month.  The monthly visit seemed annoying at the time (and sometimes still does), but it's unhealthy for the woman's body to not go through the process.  Birth control resolved that issue; at least on the surface.

When my husband and I decided to take the leap into parenthood, I just assumed it would happen.  No issues could possibly interfere.  The only medication I was taking was the birth control medication (my Crohn's was under control after my ileostomy).  Obviously, I stopped taking that.

Then the issues started.  A month went by, and I didn't have a cycle.  I'm all excited and go and get pregnancy tests.  They were negative.  That was disappointing.  But it didn't seem terribly odd to me.  I'd been taking birth control for several years at this point.  My body probably just needed time to adjust to not taking it.

Well, months went by and then almost a year had passed since I had stopped taking the medication, and still, my cycles hadn't returned and unfortunately, I still was not pregnant.  It was time to go to the doctor.  He reinforced my idea that it could take some time for my body to get back into order after stopping the birth control.  But he actually put me back on it for three months thinking that it may jump start my body.  It didn't.  At the end of the three months trial, my cycles still hadn't returned, and I still was not pregnant.

I found myself trying to will my body to do what it was supposed to.  If I could just have my cycles back, we would be able to conceive.  But there was nothing I could do of my own accord.

We took it upon ourselves to get more in depth help for reproductive issues.  We made our first appointment with a fertility clinic.  The emotional roller coaster would start here.