If you've had any experience with infertility, you're probably familiar with the "steps" your doctor may take to try and get you pregnant.
For me, it began with a tubal flush. I'm sure there's a medical term for it, and I'm sure they used it when they told me that's what they wanted to do, but I don't remember it. I only remember being told to take a few Motrin to help with the pain.
Motrin shmotrin.
Those pills have to be the running joke in the medical world. They don't do shit.
Anyways, tubal flush. Basically, to make sure there isn't some sort of blockage in your fallopian tubes, preventing the eggs from leaving the ovaries and making their way to the uterus, they have to squirt liquid through the tubes and the doctor watches on the ultrasound screen to make sure it moves through A-ok.
It was one of the most painful things I've experienced in this whole process. It's like the most intense cramps you've ever had and all you want to do is curl up in a ball, squeezing the pain from your abdomen, but you cannot move because you have a syringe inside you and the doctor needs you to be still to see what's going on through the ultrasound screen.
Once that proved to be fine, we moved to Clomid. I remember hearing things about Clomid, how you'll go hormone crazy, riding the highs and lows, driving your husband nuts. But I don't remember being that way. My husband may contradict that.
We did Clomid for a month, attempting to fertilize my eggs the old-fashioned way. My doctor repeatedly told me I was responding "beautifully" to the medicine, and I often had several well-developed follicles. But Month One resulted in no pregnancy.
Next option: Clomid with an IUI.
Intrauterine Insemination.
The "Turkey Baster."
That, it is not. It is nothing as comedic as "The Switch" makes it out to be. And, unlike a conversation I heard recently, it's not this "new thing they can do that's like using a turkey baster to get the stuff way up in there." No, hun, it's been around a while. And it isn't that simple. (If only.) You have to get the timing just right, which even then it's still an estimate, and then have your "trigger shot," the medication that tells the ovaries to "release the Kracken." Then, within a few hours or so of that shot, you get basted.
Again, another super painful procedure for me. Could be because I'm more sensitive to pain, could be because the doctors performing the procedures weren't the gentlest. Either way, it was horrible. My husband could hardly stand to be in the room watching because I was in so much agony.
In my head, I pictured a tool similar to a turkey baster that would be slid inside my uterus and fertilize the egg with my husband's fishies.
Not so much.
It's more of a catheter-like syringe that gets pushed up inside the uterus as far as possible - to get the sperm as close to the egg as possible. To do this, the doctor maneuvers through your cervix, then up into the uterus. For me, it felt like a literal tug-of-war between the doctor and my body. They struggled to get the syringe into my uterus and it was terribly painful.
We did this 3 times with no result. All of the pain for nothing. At least, that's what it felt like.
We had been told that the likelihood of the IUIs working wasn't good. So we weren't surprised when it didn't work. But the stress of everything - the medications, the timings, the pain, the exposure - was a lot, and we decided we needed a break.
That was about 5 years ago.
You don't really take into consideration the mental part of it. What a strain the hope, the failure, the anger, the hurt all are, plus the fact that nothing seems to be wrong except for the fact you can't conceive. We were weary from the struggle and needed to refocus on us. I think had we kept going, kept pushing through, kept burying the struggle, it would have created a chasm between us that would have made everything not worth it.
Because, really, in the end, I need my husband by my side. He is my literal other half. My split-apart. And, like I tell him, even if all I ever have is him, it'll be enough.
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