Try Try Again Baby

Hello friends and family, Today's  update  is a little disappointing for us to share.  The good news is that Jess has responded to the medications and we are ready for Phase 3 - the trigger shot and egg retrieval.  We take the trigger shot tonight at exactly  8:15 PM  and Jess's surgery for egg retrieval will be on Friday at exactly  8:15 AM.   Her follicle count is still looking quite high so we are hoping this means that they will get a decent number of good eggs.  The nurses and techs all seem to be very positive that we will and have repeatedly told her how fertile her insides look.  (Thank you, we think?) The bad news is that Jess has responded so much to the medications that she is at a high risk for overstimulation.  This means that there is a good chance that once the surgery is over her ovaries will stay enlarged and a substantial amount of fluid can build up in her abdomen.  In some cases, hospitalization can be needed to surgically drain the abdomen of fluid. Un

Hello friends and family, We can tell you are praying for us! So far, this has been a pretty great week.  Jess is responding really well to the medication - she has quite a number of follicles growing and maturing so the doctors seem pretty confident that we will get a good number of mature eggs at retrieval time. We have progressed to Phase 2B -- this involves a third injection given in the morning that helps her body from releasing the eggs before they are harvested.  She describes this one as a little more painful to insert, but the actual injection of the medicine burns less so it is fairly tolerable as injections go. Physically and emotionally she has been doing pretty well too.  The drastic rise in estrogen from the medications has caused nausea and daily headaches, soreness, and fatigue.  Apart from your prayers and lots of naps, she is also using her essential oils and that seems to be helping. We have "graduated" up to daily appointments.  This is ex

Hello friends and family, Our first round of IVF has officially begun.  It has been a bit of a stressful start.  The doctor's office made some mistakes with our records and the pharmacy failed to ship the medications when scheduled. There was a lot of back and forth over whether we'd actually be able to begin treatment or not which you can imagine resulted in lots of emotions the past few days. Things seem to have been sorted out now though, and we survived our first injections last night.  Doad made out a little better than Jess did ;) We are now in "stimulation" phase.  We will have several days of injections and doctor's visits to monitor progress.  Hopefully, in a couple of weeks, we will be ready for the next phase: egg retrieval.  Prayer Requests: 1. Please pray that this phase goes well.  It involves two injections each evening so the better it goes and the better Jess responds to the medication, the sooner we can move on to the nex

Hello friends and family, We got some exciting news this week:  Our insurance has officially authorized our coverage for IVF. We are currently approved to begin in March, but the doctor's office is hoping they can get the insurance to bump the start date to February.  This means that we could be starting treatment with Jess's next cycle in just a couple of weeks. Another praise: Normally, women who start IVF have to be on the birth control pill for a month prior. This helps with hormone management and scheduling purposes (so they know exactly when the next cycle will start and can plan appointments). Our preference would be to not have to do the birth control and since Jess's hormones and cycle seem to be pretty regular already we were told that it wouldn't be a problem at all and she most likely won't need that extra month of medication before being able to start! Prayer Requests: 1. Please pray that we can get all our ducks in a row in tim

If you know us at all, you know we are fairly open about our travels through "Infertility Land" and "Miscarriage Mountain" and "Ectopic Desert".   You have probably heard portions of our tales,  some large, some small, but we wanted a place to chronicle the rest of our journey and keep all of our friends up to date as much as possible.  This blog is the solution.  We'll do our best to keep this as current as we can, although if you truly want the inside scoop and the SOS calls for help you should sign up for our newsletter at bit.ly/jsmithfertility. For those of you that don't know us: we are Doad and Jess Smith. Hi! Doad is a mechanical engineer by day and a woodworking craftsman by night.  Jess is a newly trained birth doula and doTERRA Wellness Advocate (aka your essential oil guru).  As you can see, the side-hustle blood runs deep in our veins, but our biggest passion of all is to become parents.  Our adventure so far has been quite tw