My fertility journey- Chapter 1: Exited and full of hope

After being married for about a year, me and my husband finally decided to start trying for a baby. We’ve voluntarily decided to use protection for the first year of marriage, to get to know each other better and enjoy the time for ourselves before embarking on the parenting journey (little did we know, what was waiting ahead of us). After the first month of trying, using the calendar method (tracking my ovulation using an app), we understood, that trying for a baby with marking days to try to “do it” was not going to be fun. I always thought babies were made out of love. But trust me, marking your calendar for the “do it” days, made the whole process very artificial. And I for one, want to talk about this because, it is something that I don’t see people discussing very often. I feel it’s very important to normalize the notion of people talking about these things.

So, getting back to my story, we’ve been consistently trying to conceive for about 6 months with no luck. I actually thought that we were going to get pregnant within the first two months of trying and I was mentally preparing for it to happen. But, unfortunately, that’s not the norm. I started reading a lot of articles and stories of people on their TTC (Trying To Conceive) journey and found out that, the average time taken for a healthy couple to conceive is 8 months. This piece of information gave us hope and we continued trying. I used to google symptoms of implantation and exaggerate every symptom I felt during the two week wait period and associate it to one of the pregnancy symptoms (almost every symptom that you experience during the second half of your period cycle is associated with it being a pregnancy symptom). This wait eats you alive. I am sure, all those who have experienced this, can vouch for it. It is extremely consuming and ultimately very disappointing, if you don’t see the two lines on your pregnancy test, after waiting for almost 2 weeks.

As part of the online research, another thing I found out was that it is absolutely necessary for both the partners to go through the pre-conception testing to make sure our reproductive organs are functioning fine, before trying to get pregnant. More specifically, I had my hormone levels tested, along with my vitamin D levels and my immunity to certain viruses. And for my husband, it was the semen analysis. After going through these tests, we found out that my Vitamin D was very low and my husband had a sperm morphology of 2%. To give you a bit of context, Vitamin D is very essential for a woman to conceive and sperm morphology is an indicator of the shape of the sperm. The higher the number (higher percentage of the sperm are normal looking), the sperm will be in a better shape to be able to penetrate the egg to form a baby. Looking at the results, the doctor assured us that there was nothing to worry about and that I should start taking my prenatal vitamins, along with Vitamin D supplements and my husband was asked to take Zinc supplements. So, with the intake of all the supplements, we continued our TTC journey for another 4 months.

10 months in and still no luck.

Now, we started getting anxious and worried. By we, I mean “me”. Stick with me for Chapter 2 of my fertility journey. Spoiler alert- "I am not a mom yet".