The Journey - The Beginning (Part 1 of 3)

Ever since we found out Emilee was pregnant we have been on cloud nine. I never realized how something that seems so natural could be so mind altering. I do not mean mind altering in a LSD kind of way, I mean attitude altering. Our lives instantly became brighter and happier. Our friends and families instantly knew that something was up. It was impossible to hide our inner joy, but only some of you know the whole story.

Some of you were there for the play by play of our infertility journey, but many of you have no idea as to what we went through. I have wanted to share our path to pregnancy with everyone. I want to share with you the difficulties and the heartbreaks of infertility. I hope that this story gives those that got pregnant by just "holding hands"(Steve)an appreciation for how easy it was for you. I want it give hope to those that think it is never going to happen for them.

Emilee and I had of course discussed children before I asked her to marry me. I had started to write them off actually. I wasn't getting any younger and I liked my life the way it was. Who wants to be 60 and changing diapers? Not me. I figured I would still be finding ways to avoid the big relationship and enjoying whatever semblance of a life I had meted out. But she changed all of that.

Her desire soon flamed my own. I wanted to have children. It did not start off that way though. I almost "killed" our relationship six months in because I did not know if I wanted kids. Then it just got to the point that I was telling her what she wanted to hear. But as I got closer to her and we grew together I realized that I did want to have children and a family. Not that a husband and wife aren't a family, I just started to picture ours with a couple of yard apes destroying everything they touched.

So we decided to get started. Then we found out Em had cancer. We found out about a month after we were married. She had her thyroid removed due to some other issues and they biopsied it as a matter of protocol. So when it came back malignant it shocked the (fill in expletive) out of us. Emilee had to go through the radioactive iodine treatment and we were supposed to postpone our plans for six months. So in true medical professional fashion we decided not to wait.

I look back now and am glad we did not get pregnant immediately. I worry enough about the radio waves she fires off the kid's brain on a regular basis. I can't imagine what Chernobyl inspired wreck we would have produced if we had conceived right after her treatment. We probably would have been happy if the only problems had been flippers!

So we tried for a few months on our own. we tried to time her cycles and give ourselves the best opportunity we could. Unfortunately we were unable to do it on our own. So she went to her Endocrinologist and explained to him what our situation was. I think he gave her the best advice out of any of the doctors. He told her we should go have sex in a trailer park. His simple reasoning for this was;"everyone gets pregnant in the trailer park." Pretty outstanding advice I thought. Maybe we needed a Camaro and not a Mustang because it did not work either. So we had to move on to the next phase of our journey; the battle with PCOS.

To be continued...

***NOTE TO EMILEE'S/ROB'S MOM - The Mustang incident is a complete fabrication and was only added to entertain the reader!***