Finding out. . .

I got married to my husband Michael on January 30, 1999. He was 30 and I was 28 years old and we wanted to start a family right away! I assumed I would have no trouble. I had always joked about my wide child-bearing hips. I never imagined that I would have trouble getting pregnant. I had been on the pill for years! Off and on since I was 16 but mostly on. I got off the pill on our wedding night and assumed I would be pregnant within 6 months. BOY was I wrong.
About 2 months later I still hadn't had my period and I was feeling really "weird" I was having hot flashes, night sweats, painful intercourse, I was as dry as the Sahara desert (everywhere and I mean everywhere)- I thought- Gosh- is this what it feels like to be pregnant? I was working as a nurse at a large clinic at the time and took a pregnancy test and it was negative- so I went to one of the OB/GYN's to be checked. I remember when she was examining me - she got a really weird look on her face when I was describing my symptoms and them when she was doing the vaginal exam- she couldn't believe how dry I was down there. She did some blood work on me
but just said she was checking my hormone levels.

Well- fairly quickly we got the results back and my FSH was 113 and my Estrogen level was almost non-existent. She said I had Ovarian Failure and that I needed to see a Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE). I was dumbfounded. I had a million questions - it this temporary, do I still have eggs, it this because I was on the pill, will my ovaries start working again soon? I mean I was on a time line and this was really screwing things up.

I made an appointment almost immediately with a female RE in Bedford Texas who will remain nameless- but she had the absolute worst bedside manner I had ever come across. We walked in her office and it was covered with pictures of her children at all stages of development. Now mind you this lady is an infertility doctor working with women who are having a hard time conceiving - I found this display of her fertility much too "in-your-face." So we sat down (I was with my husband and mother) and she looks at my lab work for a second, shoves a box of tissue towards me and says "your have no eggs, you will never have any eggs, your only options are getting on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and using an egg donor (ED). Here's a list of our prices for egg donation and IVF (in-vitro fertilization) and a prescription for Estrogen and Progesterone- let us know when you are ready to pick your egg donor."

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I never saw this coming. Ever. I was devastated. Inconsolable. Wrecked. I looked at my husband of only 2 months and thought you poor SOB- I guess you wish you could get out of this right about now. He was wonderful- he just held me and said he married me for me and if we wanted children we could do whatever I wanted. Problem was I didn't know what I wanted - I was in major denial and would stay there for awhile longer.

I tried to find information about POF (Premature Ovarian Failure) online and found a really helpful website called www.pofsupport.org. I found out that this condition is not as rare as you might think and that supposedly 8% of women diagnosed with POF spontaneously ovulate on their own sometime in the 1st 3 years after diagnosis. I was gonna be one of those people!!
I saw one other Endocrinologist who actually spent a lot of time with me and explained things a little better. he ran some more blood work looking for anti-ovarian antibodies (antibodies that attack the ovaries and render them useless) as well as a couple of other tests to see if we could come up with a reason for the ovarian failure. None of the lab tests came back with any answers. But he did confirm my worst fears that this was permanent. I had basically gone through menopause and the chances of my ovaries starting to work again were slim to none.

So I got on the HRT and started to feel really really sorry for myself. I felt like an old woman, a biological failure, a freak of nature. . . I felt like there must be some reason that God had decided that I shouldn't be a mother. I must be a real piece of crap. These are the things that went through my mind. This was a major low point in my life complicated by the fact that my hormones were completely out of whack. I started pushing my husband away and drinking a lot. I felt hopeless and lost.