The infertility journey-part 1

I thought I would start my sharing our Infertility (IF) journey. I will try to explain the abbreviations as I go. Us IFers (infertiles) have a lot of abbreviations we use in conversation that some people may not understand.

Our journey begins in 2008 when we decided to TTC (try to conceive). It was an exciting time filled with hope.I was one of those people who wanted to be totally ready to have kids. People always gave me the one liner "you'll never be ready, you just do it." I guess I sometimes wondered why I didn't have that maternal desire yet. We had been married since 2001. I thought something was wrong with me. Then people around us started getting pg (pregnant) and it clicked that i wanted that too. We were so excited. We actually got to "try" to ttc for a whole two months before we found out the diagnosis.

 I shared my hubby's medical history with my obgyn. She ordered a SA (semen analysis) that came back with some really bad results. We were devastated. Chris had a childhood illness that essentially caused him to be azoospermic (no sperm in the semen). It was the worst news we could've ever expected and the beginning of the most painful journey of our lives.

 Infertility affects 1 in 8 people in this country, yet it is not recognized my a strikingly huge majority of insurance companies. In fact our insurance paperwork has a section heading for infertility/fertility and the only thing under that heading is that it covers 100% of a vasectomy or tubal ligation. It also states that it covers 100% of birth control with no copay. Why is it that every thing is covered at 90% after deductible except that? . Keeping people from having babies is priority in the insurance industry. There is certainly some history there in our society that I will cover another day. With the abortion industry being made a bigger deal than obstetrics and peds, Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger and all of her history in this area, and the feminist movement,  all of it plain makes me sick. I could write days of blog posts on this. There is a great lie that the world is overpopulated already. I don't think God, the author of human life and creator of this world, is concerned with overpopulation. The concept of population control is not a new thing...think Hitler and his ethnic cleansing propaganda and subsquent genocide of innocent peoples. Anyway--I'll save all that for another day. In a nutshell, insurance is all part of the red tape bureaucracy that is involved with contracting with employers to determine what they want to cover while also being "in bed" with lobbyists and politicians. It's not pretty and not clean. Money is clean...you pay cash for something you usually are gonna get what you pay for and then some. Everything involving infertility has been paid 100% out of pocket by Chris and I. It's really difficult when money stands in the way of a dream the other 7 out of 8 people get to experience just by sleeping together at the right time to make a baby.

So after seeing a couple of urologists in Feb 2009 we found a super guy in Raleigh. He was confident Chris has a blockage and he could have a surgical biopsy to find out. If he did we had two options...harvest the sperm and do IVF or have a Epididymovasostomy which is the equivalent of what a man has when he regrets his vasectomy and wants it reversed. When a guy has a Vasectomy, the cut in the Vas Deferens is what causes the sperm to be cut off from expulsion during sex When a vasectomy is reversed, they reconnect the Vas. So, a blockage can be repaired by cutting the Vas and reconnecting it to a patent (open) tubule. This urologist is one of the few docs who does this in the state. Not only was he talented, he was kind and honest. He felt confident this could be done if necessary. We scheduled the surgical biopsy at Rex hospital. This was done under general anesthesia and the doc was certain insurance would cover such a procedure. So we opted to do it on May 22, 2009. Just to explain what Chris went through---they cut about a 1 inch incision in the scrotum to access the testicles and biopsy them. This is PAINFUL. Any guy knows that this area is sensitive and painful anyway. And to a guy something like this is devastating. The pathology report showed normal spermatogenesis--sperm production. When Chris was in recovery after the biopsy, I went to find a bathroom to cry...tears of joy, of course but i just was so relieved I had to cry. Then I went to the gift shop and I bought him a card to take to him to tell him the good news that the urologist shared with me. I couldn't decide what kind of card to get. What do you get and what do you write? Congrats on the swimmers? Get well soon? So I got him a "congratulations on your new baby" card. LOL! He thought that was funny! But he cried...and the nurse saw him and was offered pain meds..he said.."no i'm not in pain." We both cried that day. It was a major victory in our story--but the peaks and valleys were yet to come.  So, we opted to schedule the Epididymovasostomy to repair the blockage-----



In my next blog I'll tell this part of the story---