Medicating the Problem
Adam and I talked it through and decided we wanted to at least try to take some of the necessary steps to have a baby. Since my body wouldn’t let me leave it up to the universe, this meant we would follow our doctor’s recommendations. In my mind that meant we would do more testing to discover what the issues were and then treat them. Well I was wrong.
The doctors said I had an “ovulatory issue.” No further testing was done to determine what was causing the ovulatory issue or if any other issues were keeping us from getting pregnant. They just prescribed me a bunch of medications, told me to take them, and said we would all hope for the best. That was not what I wanted to hear at all. As someone who spent years on birth control for medical reasons, I was finally experiencing life without medication and excessive hormones. Thus, I did not want to jump back into being medicated unless it was absolutely necessary to treat whatever issues were keeping us from getting pregnant. To do that, I believed we needed to determine the actual issues first. I learned that that is not how it works in the infertility world though.
In the infertility world, the first thing they do is medicate you and hope you get pregnant. In fact, if you go to your doctor and simply say you have been trying for a year, they will automatically do the same thing. This drove me nuts. I told my doctors over and over that I wanted to know what was going on with me. That was the reason I had sought their attention in the first place. I only wanted to take medications that were absolutely necessary. I did not want to blanket the issue with pills. They did not understand this at all. In the fertility world, if you want to get pregnant then this is the first step, so you are expected to just start taking pills and not ask any questions. Heaven forbid you want to figure out the real reason why you cannot get pregnant.
First they prescribed chlomid, and when that didn’t work, they prescribed femara. Both didn’t do anything, except make me feel awful. I still wasn’t ovulating and now I couldn’t control my emotions. I didn’t feel anything like myself. I felt like an insane person had kidnapped my body and I hated to think that I was going to feel this way while trying to get pregnant. I mean I knew I would be hormonal and sick after getting pregnant, but that was fine because there would be a baby involved. Plus, I still wanted to know what was actually going on with me. After a long hormonal cry to Adam that I couldn't just keep taking pills, we decided to seek a second opinion. We decided it was time to speak to a specialist instead of just my regular gynecologist.