As early as middle school, I was told I would probably never be able to get pregnant. Over the years, I have had other doctors tell me the same. Through extreme pain, doctors never gave me answers or suggestions how to fix it. When Michael and I got married, we both knew we wanted to start a family right away. We still held out hope I could get pregnant naturally. We tried for a couple months without success so I went to go see my regular doctor. I told her what I had been dealing with and that I was ready for some actual answers. She referred me to a gynecologist, who finally told me that I had some pretty big cysts on my ovaries and she expected them to be endometriosis. She told me she really didn’t want to touch anything because of how bad it was and she sent me straight to an infertility specialist. I started seeing the specialist in April. She did some testing, then she showed us that the cyst on my right ovary was 1 cm away from needing emergency surgery. I have a cyst on both ovaries, they are both large in size. The right one is pretty much covering my entire ovary. She gave us some options to consider, and said she needed to talk to her collegues to figure out if she was doing the right thing for us. 1 in 8 women have endometriosis but only a handful have it as bad has I have it. I have Stage 4 Endometriosis. The chance of having a baby naturally is less then 1%. After lots of prayer and discussion, we have decided to move forward with IVF. The first step will be egg retrieval. Then I will need to have surgery to get all the cysts out. After I am cleared, the embryos will be implanted. Naturally, this has all been a lot to take in. Nobody sees their journey to motherhood like this. I have always dreamed about getting pregnant, sharing the news with our family, and carrying our babies. No, this is not how we saw the process of making a family going, but we aren’t giving up and we will do anything we have to to have a family of our own. It will be emotionally and physically trying for us. We will also be driving back and forth to appointments that are in Carmel. We would appreciate all your support, especially prayers during this time.
