Trigger warnings: Miscarriage, drug addict contractors, IVF, infertility, doctors ignoring patients
While working to run our little farm, we’ve also been dealing with personal fertility issues for the past 3 years. It has been exhausting!
In 2022, we decided to give having kids a go. We’re older and knew going into it that it might not happen, but we figured it was worth a shot! After removing my IUD, I became pregnant way sooner than we had thought possible. But unfortunately, we lost it within about 5-6 weeks.
A few months later, we were pregnant again!
Sadly, we found out at the 10-week scan that that one was lost, as well. We’re pretty sure that it was after a probable-meth-head contractor (CHAD KRCMA – watch out for him!) came to our property and infected me with Covid. He ended up running away with our money after buying the wrong materials and without finishing the project, so it was a lose-lose-lose-lose-lose situation for us. I very badly wanted to take him to small claims court, but Ken said that we should avoid small-town drama. But seriously, F that guy.
Anyway! The doctor at the time gave me the option to wait and miscarry naturally, but given the increasing size of my retained empty sac, that was quickly becoming dangerous. She recommended trying meds and then if those didn’t work, a D&C. I tried the meds, but not everything came out. After researching how dangerous to future-fertility an incorrectly performed D&C can be, I found the highest-rated doctor in the area and scheduled with him (Dr. Coussons).
Unfortunately, our experience with him wasn’t great. He did the D&C and noted that it was complex & difficult & bloody, but he did zero follow-up scans. He put me on an antibiotic and then a couple months of Clomid, but didn’t really run any tests and was super hard to get ahold of. He ignored multiple months of Day 1 Cycle calls before we gave up on him.
We then moved on to our only other option in the area – Dr. Green at Aurora Baycare’s fertility clinic. She was surprised that Dr. Coussons used Clomid – apparently, it can permanently damage an already-thin uterine lining, so that’s cool.
Dr. Green was super nice and did a bunch of blood tests and a hysterosalpingogram & didn’t find a definite reason for the miscarriages, so we decided to move forward with IVF. At the time, she was the only provider at her practice, so it was very hard to get onto the schedule – it took almost two years to do four egg retrievals. Our retrieval results were not great, but over the course of those four cycles, we did get a little trio of euploid embryos – one boy and two girls!
Super weirdly, I was right about the results every time – I knew that we would get nothing, then a boy, then two girls, then a mosaic. I really think we might have gotten something good with that fourth cycle if we had triggered a day later, but it was a holiday and we suspect that the doctor wanted to be off and we didn’t push hard enough.
We very badly wanted to keep trying, but ran out of money. I’ll officially age out by the time we pay off that 4th retrieval, so this is it. We decided to start trying to implant our little trio early 2025. The doctor did a new hysterosalpingogram in January to doublecheck my uterus and found a concerning area that indicated adhesions (aka scarring) connecting the walls of my uterus. These adhesions could prevent an embryo from implanting, so the doctor recommended a hysteroscopy to take a closer look and remove anything abnormal. The obgyn performing the surgery warned that I’d probably be unable to help with the farm for a couple weeks, and kidding season was about to start, so we opted to delay the procedure until after all of our goat kids were born.
We finally did the procedure on Friday – the doctor found extensive adhesions all throughout my uterus, called Asherman Syndrome. It was so bad that she wasn’t even sure she was in the right spot at first. She took a few samples to biopsy, and those results came back today: they were positive for old pregnancy tissue, or Retained Products of Conception. For almost 3 years, I’ve had leftover remains stuck up in there.
This part is also important: All through these years of trying to conceive with the help of doctors, I have complained to them and the nurses every single month that my periods have been MUCH shorter and lighter than they had ever been. And every single time, I was dismissed and told that “every woman’s cycle is different.” But light or missing periods are the #1 sign of Asherman Syndrome. Again, I’m kicking myself for not pushing harder when I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to come across as rude or a hypochondriac.
Sigh.
I have an appointment with the obgyn tomorrow to remove the balloon that she left in my uterus to try to prevent re-adhesion and we’ll come up with a game plan. It sounds like the normal protocol is to do 1+ more hysteroscopies to make sure that no new scar tissue has formed. According to Google, with the severe degree of long-term damage to my endometrium, there’s about a 5-20% chance that I will be able to carry a pregnancy to term. So we’ll see what happens!
