My journey through the grief of infertility to motherhood

Hands down, the greatest grief I have ever experienced was when I wanted to become a mom, but couldn’t. Infertility sucked the life out of my husband and me for three LONG years! If you’ve experienced grief, you may know there are five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I progressed through them all.

First came the denial. No way was a smart, educated women like myself not going to be able to conceive a child. I have a PhD in pharmacology and know exactly how reproductive hormones work and how babies are made. I thought making babies was going to be an easy process.

Next came the anger. We decided to wait to start a family until we had all our ducks in a row. I finished school, we bought a house, I started my career, and we even put some money into savings. So, finally at the age of 27, we were ready to bring another human into the world. We did everything right, but I got more and more angry with every passing month without a child.

Bargaining. I began to bargain with myself. Initially I wanted a large family, but after struggling for years, all I wanted was one healthy child. One healthy child, was that too much to ask for? I would have traded my right leg for the chance to be a mother.

After a year of trying to conceive, we got the elusive positive pregnancy test. We were over-the-moon happy, but that all came crashing down a week later when I suffered a miscarriage. We felt defeated. Over the next few years, we had four more losses. The only worse feeling in life than a negative pregnancy test is experiencing a miscarriage, then another, then another… Depression hit me hard!

Acceptance. Hello, my name is Amy and I am infertile. I have accepted my infertility. I have accepted that my body just doesn’t produce enough progesterone to support a pregnancy. I have accepted that I needed some help from medical professionals to get pregnant and stay pregnant. I have accepted that I have a chromosomal translocation, a genetic condition that results in over 50% of my pregnancies ending in miscarriage. I have accepted my reality. Having successful pregnancies is just not easy for me.

Luckily my story doesn’t stop there. I am a strong, smart woman. I was tired of seeing friends and family members suffer though the pain of infertility as I had done. My journey taught me that I had the power to use my experiences to positively impact the journeys of others. I learned about reproductive hormones and how not having a correct balance of hormones can cause infertility. Unfortunately, I also learned how expensive infertility treatments were and that there was a severe lack of in-home tools available for couples who want to know more about their hormonal levels that control fertility.

While on my own infertility journey, I began charting cervical mucus, tracking basal body temperature, and using ovulation predictor kits (LH test strips) to better understand why my body wasn’t working.

Using these tools and my doctor’s help, we were able to diagnose that I had a luteal phase defect. The period of time between ovulation and next menses is called the luteal phase. For a successful pregnancy, the luteal phase needed to be at least 10 days; mine was 6 or 7 days.

I loathed temperature tracking. All night I would stress about not moving a muscle at night, yell at my husband to turn the darn fan off, and set my alarm for 5 a.m. on my days off. I really loved peeing on a stick and it being able to predict ovulation based on hormone levels. I wondered why I couldn’t just pee on a stick to confirm ovulation as well? Progesterone goes up only after ovulation; why wasn’t there a progesterone pee stick?  Seemed much easier and more accurate to me. I discovered it was possible; the science was there, there just wasn’t a commercial product in the market that women could buy and use.

To be continued: How I survived infertility and became a mom and an inventor.

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  1. Comment by Evelyn on July 2, 2017 at 4:55 pm

    Ha ha! I hadn’t paid attention to the byline or the date, so when I got to the last line, I was thinking, “No! No! There ARE progesterone pee sticks now!” And then I saw your bio 🙂

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