My name is Randi. I'm currently a stay-at-home wife, who is attempting to make a living online through various means, but I'm also hoping to begin working as an elderly care companion soon. I'm also a slightly neurotic willing-to-try anything woman on a mission to conceive a healthy baby.
I'll give a little bit of background: I graduated from college in 2003 and in 2004 on a whim, moved to Las Vegas with my sister and brother-in-law. I met my husband, Mike, there while working at a casino. We knew we were meant to be together as soon as we started dating. He moved in with us pretty much after the first date, and a month and a week shy of our first anniversary we were married.
We didn't immediately start trying to have a baby because we'd both lost our jobs when the casino we worked at went out of business, but I had a job and insurance within 4 months, so we started trying at the end of March 2006. We found out that I was pregnant on July 28, 2006. We were both so excited, we told everyone the good news and started planning a future with our baby.
Sadly, at our 20 week ultrasound on November 15, 2006 the tech discovered fluid around the heart and stomach of our baby. We were rushed into an emergency appointment with a perinatologist and pediatric cardiologist the next day. They told us there was no chance our baby would survive and that she had the worst heart defect they'd ever seen. We lived in Las Vegas, which means these doctors saw a lot of babies with heart defects and for it to be the worst they'd ever seen was really devastating. She also had an enlarged stomach, acytes (not sure on spelling but excess fluid) in her stomach and chest cavity, had stopped developing at 16 weeks, a cleft palate, and a few other developmental defects. We were given the option of ending the pregnancy then but our little girl was still alive and we wanted to give her every opportunity we could.
So, we waited and prayed for a Christmas miracle. We had people all over the country and in two other countries praying for our dying baby. We really believed that if we prayed hard enough that God would give us that miracle. I woke up one night a couple weeks later, and a week before our next appointment that fell on our first anniversary, crying because I'd dreamed that our baby had died. I refused to accept that because I kept feeling her move. We also got the results of our genetics testing in during that time and found out that our baby had inherited a very rare chromosome defect from my husband. It's so rare there are only 3 people known to have it on earth, and my husband and daughter were 2 of them. The chromosome affected is responsible for skin and organ development, which explained why she had so many developmental issues.
Mike had just started a new job and had orientation the day of our next appointment, so my sister went with me. They began with an ultrasound. I was talking with my sister and asked the tech if our girl was behaving for her. I hadn't noticed that one of the techs had left to get our doctor. The doctor had been across town at his other office, but he rushed over to tell me that our baby girl had passed. I'd made Mike promise that he would leave his cell phone on in case of an emergency at the appointment, but I knew I couldn't call and tell him our daughter had died, so I waited until I went to pick him up from work.
My parents were coming in town to visit the next day, and the hardest part was that was supposed to be a day of celebration for us but instead we were in the beginning of mourning our baby. My husband couldn't take off work until the day before the funeral, so we waited until December 15th to be induced because it was the beginning of his weekend. We wanted to be able to see our baby.
We buried her on December 20th and two days later the rest of my family was celebrating the birth of my oldest nephew. I couldn't stand to hear him cry, see pictures or video or anything of him. It was just devastating for us because everyone else was so happy and most nights I cried myself to sleep because we'd never get to have that with our baby.
A few months later I began having issues with my cycles. At first I thought the 16 day long bleed (sorry if TMI) was my body trying to readjust itself to not being pregnant, but it continued for even longer in my second post partem cycle. I went to my perinatologist because I didn't know what to do and I'd seen him for my follow up, he sent me to an ob/gyn down the hall from his office. That man insisted that I had diabetes and a host of other obesity related illnesses causing my problems. He ran all sorts of tests to prove to me that he was right and I didn't know what I was talking about. All of his tests came back that I was probably the healthiest "obese" person he'd ever met.
After he told me to wait another cycle and if it didn't correct itself by then, I decided I wasn't going back to him. The bleeds got longer and didn't correct themselves. Mike and I had decided that we were going to start trying for another baby immediately after we were given the go ahead, so despite my cycle issues we started trying again. We found out I was pregnant again in November 2007. There was fear that the same thing would happen again, a lot of stress because of some family issues, and for me stress at work because I didn't want to tell them I was pregnant again as I'd lost a promotion during my first pregnancy because I was pregnant.
We found out after I'd started spotting at 10 weeks that we'd had a missed miscarriage, on January 7, 2008. Within an hour of leaving the doctors office, I'd passed the baby without any medication to induce it or an operation. That time, though upsetting, wasn't as traumatic as losing our daughter.
The cycle that I got pregnant the second time was the last cycle that I ovulated. I haven't ovulated since because my hormones got out of whack when I was pregnant the first time, then with depression, mourning, and stress from everything, it just made it worse. I didn't go back to get it fixed and just hoped that it would fix itself. I waited 2 1/2 years until I realized it just wasn't going to fix itself.
I'd told my general practitioner about my issues but they didn't specialize in gynecology so they didn't do anything. I finally got a referral from a medical assistant for a reproductive endocrinologist in July 2010. My first appointment with the doctor confirmed everything that I'd discovered in my online research. I'm a researcher by nature and through the process of elimination, and one phrase from that ob/gyn after my first pregnancy, I was better prepared.
The RE put me on provera to stop the bleeding immediately, then clomid to induce ovulation. He told me the reason I was having menometrogghia, the long cycles and long bleeds, was because I wasn't ovulating and more than likely I was insulin resistant. I loved the RE because he seemed to know what I was going through and did exactly what I had expected him to do. He didn't even harp on my weight but suggested that I needed to lose some weight. I told him I'd had issues with that because no matter how much I watched what I ate and exercised daily, I wasn't losing weight. He said that was normal with my issue.
The next appointment, I go in and he does a complete about face. He tells me that I really don't want to have a baby because I had gained some weight instead of losing weight. I felt like a naughty schoolgirl in the principal's office. I was actually crying in his office during the appointment because of the way he was talking to me. I felt like, he hadn't listened to me at all. He even yelled at me for not tracking my basal body temperature for him. He told me that I had tracked my cycles and the length of the bleeds for 3 years, so why hadn't I been doing something like tracking my BBTs. He hadn't told me to, and I figured with the progesterone tests he was doing on day 24 of my cycle, he'd be able to tell without them.
I stopped going to him after that and began looking for alternative methods of fixing my issues now that I knew what they were. That was a year ago.
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