My Twisted Story

I don’t really know how to start this story.

I’ve been married for three and a half years. Hubby and I talked from practically the first day we met about having kids. Before we got together, he had been thinking about adopting a child on his own. He has always wanted children as much as I have.

When we got married, I was in graduate school, so we couldn’t try right away (when I say right away, I mean that day, lol). As I started my last year of school, we started doing math for when we could start trying. If everything worked out perfectly, we figured we could get pregnant in August and I could graduate before our baby arrived.

So in July of 2010 I stopped taking birth control pills. I didn’t have my first period after that until December. I remember in August being nervous when I didn’t get my period. I knew many women didn’t get their periods back as soon as they stopped taking the pill, and I knew deep down I would be one of them. I had ALWAYS had extremely irregular periods as an adolescent, and going on the pill was the only thing that regulated my cycles.

But that month I was still nervous. I took a test anyway. I remember telling my husband that not getting my period meant one of two things. Either we were pregnant, or getting pregnant was going to be a very long, hard road for us. I didn’t know at the time how prophetic my words would be.

He held me as I cried through that first negative test. Little did we know it was only the first of many more that would come through the next years.

After a few months of frustrated trying, I realized that my periods were too irregular to just guess when I was ovulating. I started charting my BBT. After about a year, it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get any kind of useable pattern out of my charts. I got frustrated, and so sick of the advice “just quit trying and it will happen.”

It was around that time that we stopped officially trying. Not that we ever stopped trying, and not that every period that came didn’t feel like a complete failure on my part, but outwardly, we stopped trying for a while.

Fast forward a little bit. It is now January of this year, 2013. As I said, I have always had irregular periods. What that has meant for me was that I might go two, three, or even four months without a period. Then it would finally come and I would bleed for weeks. Usually this happened once or twice a year.

This year has been different. Since January, there has been very little time that I haven’t been bleeding. Thankfully, in January I started keeping track of when I was bleeding. I know for certain that there have been 54 days in the last 7 months that I wasn’t bleeding. Most of those were the month of March.

In May, I finally decided that it had gotten to a point where something was wrong with my body. My reproductive system isn’t working the way it is supposed to, and I need some help. The first available appointment at my local, insurance covered OB/Gyn clinic was July 11, which is tomorrow.

I have been “patiently” waiting ever since. You see, I’m terrified of doctors. I don’t know why, but when I think about going to one, my heart starts to race, I get sweaty, I start to panic. This week I have broken down crying no less than 3 times because I am so apprehensive about my appointment tomorrow.

I think tomorrow is going to be the first appointment of countless more.

I don’t like talking about my infertility. I hate the looks I get, the comments people make when they think they’re being helpful. I hate feeling like it is my fault, that I’m broken somehow. So, tomorrow I start down another leg of my journey.

And I couldn’t be more terrified.

At the least, I hope they can make the bleeding stop. I hope they can tell me why my body is acting this way and fix it. I just don’t think I’m going to like the answer.