As promised..."the" story-part 1

I know many of you have been or are going through what we've experienced and will experience. You know you always think getting pregnant is going to be easy. You'll stop taking the pill or whatever it may be and bam there you have it. Well for us, it didn't work like that. I'll be honest, for us, most things we've come across in our married lives have been difficult. I don't know why, I don't know why God chose us to go through these things, but what I do know is that from what I've experienced, I may be able to help someone who is experiencing what we have been through (and again, what we'll go through).

Like I said before, Tommy and I were married in 1999. We lived away from all of our families during the first part of our marriage and both of us, mainly me, wanted to move back closer to "our roots." In 2005, Tommy received a new job which allowed us to move "back home"; we prayed because we wanted it to be the right decision. Our house sold in 2 weeks and we packed up all of our belongings and moved them into storage. We built a new house and anxiously awaited what would be next for us.

We had talked about having children but never talked "seriously" about it until we moved "back home." We hosted a foreign exchange student in 2006 and loved having her with us so much that it was time to try for our own little family. This was in December of 2006. Days went by, then weeks, then months. What's wrong? What's happening? Why isn't this working? Then month after month mother nature played cruel tricks with my mind. This is it. This has to be it. Each month ended with a resounding, no.

I started reading a book and began taking my temperatures to chart my every move (well not really but that's what it felt like). Everything looked normal so why wasn't this working? After 9 months of trying, I saw the doctor for my yearly physical and asked her about it. She advised me to wait until the year mark and then we'd look into testing. If we wanted, she said, we could get Tommy tested first because it's easier and cheaper. So we waited and kept trying, still nothing.

A brief background on Tommy. He was born with a cogenital heart defect. Basically the weak side of his heart does the pumping. He's had a pacemaker since he was 5 and in 2002 went into cardiac arrest which resulted in a pacemaker/defibrillator now. This helps control irregular rhythms, along with a mound of medicine. But we're thankful he's here. He talked to his cardiologist about us trying and he offered to send him to a urologist to be tested. To make this story short, after much testing we learned it would be difficult for us to become pregnant on our own. The doctor told us that IVF was going to be our best bet, our only option. We really didn't know that much about it so they proceed to tell us a little intro and that it would cost, probably, around $15,000. Wow, really?

We thought about it, cried together, and decided to read more to educate ourselves. This was our problem together. We were in this together. We found a clinic (for those of you that aren't familiar, to go through IVF you go to an infertility "clinic"--I hate that word) in South Carolina (they don't do IVF cycles in our town). We made an appointment and went through all sorts of tests, blood draws, you name it, we had it done! Our doctor, Dr S, was great and she gave us a 65% chance of things working. The other good news is they had a progesterone study going on right now and we would qualify; even though we'd still have to pay, our costs would be much lower. It seemed like everything was lining up just the way it should. We felt like we were right where God wanted us. It felt like, for the first time in a long time, that this would work; that we would become parents, that our little family of two would become three or maybe even four.