It’s that time. Time to get serious about having kids. All the tests have been run and so far we’ve found I don’t ovulate on my own and I have a minor case of hemophilia C (no big deal, mostly it’s just a gene thing.) I’m not ready to have kids (or, kid) but I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Right now, with my “$500k before kids” goal in sight, I’m turning my attention to the most important part of a “having kids” objective: getting pregnant.
My doctor put me on metformin for my PCOS, which doesn’t fix anovulation but it can regulate cycles which potentially could increase ovulation frequency should it actually be happening ever (infertility doc explained that even women who don’t ovulate might – sometimes – ovulate. You just don’t have any idea when so it’s pretty hard to get pregnant (you have 48 hours so around this time to make a baby, and you don’t know when it is, so, you can do the math.)
It’s hard to focus on any other aspect of my life right now when having a child is such a top priority. The metformin is already making a huge difference, I can tell, in my health. I had skyrocketed up to 182 pounds after my wedding (from 150), and now I’m back on the way down thanks to metformin making me not hungry. It’s so strange, I had been eating so much junk food to snack on throughout the day prior to starting the met and now I look at cookies and cake and any carb-y snack and I just have no desire to eat it. I was 176 last night which is still way too much but I think from just being on this medicine alone I should get back down into the 160s, and then I need to start hardcore exercising again.
Hubby and I are taking a belated honeymoon in September, so the plan right now is to focus the next five months on getting super healthy (I’d like to lose at least 20 pounds, or 4 pounds a month over 5 months) to get down to ~155 for the honeymoon. It’s possible during this time I will get pregnant while on the met, and that’s great. If that doesn’t work, I’ll start on Femera (which is like Clomid) in late September, and if I’m not pregnant by 2018 and age 34 it’s time to start talking about IVF. By then, I’d want to be at about 135 lbs, a healthy weight for my height so hopefully I can have a child.
That timeline feels good. Despite being 33 and feeling like I need to hurry up, I don’t want to feel stressed about this or get my hopes up too much. I figure I have 5 years to make this work for at least one kid (with the help of in-vitro). Ideally, the metformin and weight loss magically gets me pregnant with my first child in the next 5 months. Met does seem to help some women get pregnant, according to the internet, even though my doctor says the drug alone will not help with the ovulation issue. So we’ll see.
I’m trying to relax, because stress is bad for fertility. It’s hard to relax when I’m so stressed about my job and life overall. But this is more important than any job or anything else. I want a family. I know that will make life even more complicated and stressful, but I have faith that life will work itself out once I have a new priority. I’m getting excited about the whole being pregnant thing and having a kid. I feel so much more confident now than I did in my 20s about raising children and helping nurture them into independent, well-adjusted adults. I know it’s the luck of the draw when it comes to kid’s personalities, but I’d like to think there is some amount of nurturing and love I can provide to have an overall loving and happy family. Even though I’m not pregnant, yet, I can’t wait to meet my children. I can’t wait to feel that kind of maternal love.
If you want to track your ovulation inexpensively, you could do the basal body temperature method. I know there are apps that help you track it, or I bought a pack of ovulation & pregnancy test strips cheaply on Amazon, which are much cheaper than the tests you can buy in a drugstore.
Women with PCOS cannot do this – their BBT doesn’t actually show when ovulation is happening, because we rarely ovulate and apparently temps can range. I am going to try anyway.
That’s interesting – I didn’t realize!