"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" - Confucius

My son was born in 2008. He was not planned, but a very pleasant surprise none the less. Because I have had one child, I never thought that having more would be an issue. Oh how I was wrong!

In November 2009, I had an abnormal pap. I have had abnormal ones before, so it wasn't that big of news for me. My Dr (Dr K) told me to come back in 6 months for another one, which I did. That one was abnormal also. I returned about a month later to have the tissues scraped out and sent in to be tested. They came back as the beginnings of cancer.

I had to go back in a few weeks later and have all my tissues frozen off to kill the unwanted cells. This procedure was not pleasant, but I was in and out within about an hour. My follow up pap come back normal, and I was so relieved. I thought I was out of the woods and we would have no more troubles.

M and I knew that we wanted more children, 2 more in fact, and thought that after about a year of enjoying being newlyweds, we would decide a date, DTD (do the deed), and be pregnant. To help prepare my body for this, we decided to stop BC in August, a month before our wedding. We were not too worried if we ended up pregnant before a year and thought that not trying to, but not trying not to was a good plan. Only, this plan brought up more problems.

I started to have pains in my ovaries. I guess "pains" isn't exactly the best term to describe them, more like someone stabbing me, Every. Single. Day. There isn't a day that doesn't go by still that I don't hurt. On top of those pains, I was having non stop periods. The longest stretch I went without a period was 11 days (with the help of progesterone), then I started another 7+ day period. This went on for a couple months. Dr K put me on progesterone to cease my period for the wedding, and hopefully to get my body to start working on a regular cycle. It worked to halt the period, for a few days, but it didn't get my body cycling normal. Because of the non-stop periods, Dr K came to the conclusion that I may not be ovulating any more.

Being 23 at this time, and hearing I am not ovulating anymore, broke me. How could my body, at such a young "prime" age, not work?! Was this like menopause? Would I ever cycle again? Would I ever be able to get pregnant if I don't ovulate? How would M feel if we could not have kids because my body decided to do its own thing and stop working? The questions and fears ran wild in my head. Dr K referred me over to a fertility specialist (FS) to see what we could do and hopefully find out more of what was going on.

The FS diagnosed me with endometriosis (that is what causes my pains every day) and PCOS. The PCOS makes my ovaries almost leather like because of all the cysts covering them. This makes it really difficult for my body to be able to release an egg each month. The solution? Have surgery or get pregnant now.

Since M and I knew we wanted to have kids, and neither one of us is too fond with the idea of them blowing my stomach up, inserting lasers, and cutting at my reproductive organs, we decided we might as well just try to have a baby right now. No biggie. I was already off BC and we were ready to go. We figured that because of the endometriosis and PCOS, it might take a couple months, and we would probably need a little medication help, but that was ok. We got to it expecting that by the following fall (fall 2011) we would have our baby to take home. Little did we know that this was the single step to our journey of a thousand miles.