So how did we get here...

The infertility story so far...

Since my mum had been told she could never have children I was under no illusions that concieving wasn't always as easy as people might hope, I knew that on average it could take up to a year.  But of course I'd hoped it wouldn't affect me, I didn't expect it to!  I seemed fine, no medical problems, not like my mum and others I had known who suffered infertility.

We prayed for a long time and pretty intensively for 3 months about whether it was right to try to start trying for a baby.  My biggest concern has always been the salvation of any children we have and we felt strongly that God had been clear that our children would know Him, we took that as the green light!

A month passed, then 2, 3, 4 I think it was around then that we had real hope that we had been successful, we even went to the doctors to have a test done, but it was just an extra long cycle.  Thats when I realised how desperate I was for this.  At 6 months we asked for prayer from a few people about it and at 1 year I went to see my GP who referred us to the specialist at the hospital.

The first few appointments at the hospital were lots of questions and a few examinations, the wait to see the doctor was ridiculous!  I was sent for a couple of scans and a SALP (not nice!) everything came back fine from both sides.  The next option was Clomid tablets for 3 months.

I'm not a fan of Chlomid but it was fine at first, unfortunately it didn't help.  Next stage was IUI.  We prayed a lot about whether to procede and had others doing the same and we felt it was right to procede.  By this time the hospital had a really nice new assisted reproduction unit.  We had four lots of IUI with Chlomid, each time the end result was a bit worse.  Glad I don't have to take it any more!  Another year and a half had past and now the only thing left to consider was IVF.

At the start of the process not knowing much about IVF we assumed we would have ethical issues with it and so said we would not consider it.  After we spoke at length with the embryologist we were satisfied that no embryos (even poor ones) would not be disguarded, they offered to store as many as we wanted and we planned to use all of them.  So the decision really came down to whether we felt this was something that was in God's plan for us.  To be honest we felt it was an open decision, either would be fine, but we wanted to do what was best!

We'd been praying about it for about a year seriously then after the IUI we prayed for about another 6 months before feeling it was right to go ahead, not because we thought the procedure would be our saviour but mainly because we felt that it was something good for us to experience as it would mean we had to rely completely on God and I hoped the experience might mean I could help someone else in the same position one day.  We were clear that our hope was in God not a procedre.  We had a false start due to hormone levels which meant I was switched for the next cycle onto an antagonist protocall.  This was a new regime that works with the body's own hormones and has way less side effects.  It was also shorter so we ended up with the same scan dates as we would have had the previous month!  Unfortunately the cycle had to be abandoned as I didn't respond on the drugs after the first week, though we kept going until the last minute just in case!

Our next attempt came after easter last year, everything went well, everything fine, 8 eggs collected, 6 mature, 6 fertilised! Two replaced, but no pregnancy :-(

Because God is gracious we weren't crushed!  We stored the remaining four embryos but none of them survived to be replaced.

Back to the drawing board and another 6 months to decide if we want to try again (we get 3free IVF cycles on the NHS)

We (much more aprehensively) tried again but had another cycle which had to be abandoned.  That was a few months ago and we are back to the same place we were two years ago.  Do we go through IVF again? Or does God have something else in store?