Thursday, April 28, 2011

Myth: If you already have one child, you know you are fertile and will have no problems conceiving again

We are living proof that this is a myth. We got pregnant with our first son within two months of stopping birth control. We never thought becoming pregnant again would be a problem, even our regular OB/GYN didn't believe that we would have a problem. My favorite was him pointing to my child and saying, "Well we know that your husband works by the looks of your son, so let's get you ovulating." So a few cycles of clomid and OPK and no results left us confused, until my hubby saw a urologist. What the big surprise for us was the diagnosis...male factor obstructive azoospermia. How could we possibly have a child if my husband's sperm count is zero?!? We have some answers, but not all. His hernia repair surgeries damaged his vas deferens, but his surgeries were before we conceived our son (the last one being 4 months before conception). I guess our son was conceived with the last of the swimmers left in the tubes. So we had male factor secondary infertility.

Of course after we told people we couldn't have any more children on our own they would ask why we had to do IVF after TESA for a baby. "Couldn't you just shoot some sperm up in there and get pregnant?" First of all I guess I could with donor sperm, but we did not want that route yet, and TESA does not retrieve much sperm, IVF/ICSI was our only option to have a biological child.
Another comment I would get was, "It only takes one." Well if you know the facts under 20 million sperm is a low count, and last I checked 20 million is a whole lot more than one, and if people were having trouble getting pregnant with 20 million my chances were zero.

After all this explanation well meaning people would say, "Since you already have a child, it will be easy for your body to get pregnant with the IVF, you will only have to do it once and you will get triplets." In reality it took three times. One completely failed cycle, one canceled cycle and one frozen cycle to get one child. Even though my body had been pregnant, it didn't mean that I would automatically get pregnant with help. Many factors go into getting pregnant, and it doesn't always work, even if your body has had a successful pregnancy.

For more information about infertility go to:
http://www.resolve.org/infertility101
http://www.resolve.org/takecharge

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