Miscarriage, Thyroid, IUI, Chronic Pain

Pam had an easy road to parenthood right up until she started trying for a third child. For over five years, she was bogged down by health issues and chronic pain but couldn’t give up her hope of having another child. Her advice to anyone experiencing trouble building a family is to trust your gut and don’t listen to negative people, they’ll drag you down. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

Pam N.’s Story:

My journey to parenthood started somewhat easily. It was 2001, right after September 11th, I had gone out to see my friend, my only friend, that had had kids already. I was on the fence — especially after September 11th — about bringing kids into this world. She gave me all these books about taking charge of your fertility and some other book about natural parenting. Even after we had this terrible catastrophic terrorist thing happen, she was so gung-ho about parenthood. She said, “You've got to do this!” She was infectious in that way. We became friends when I had just arrived at college. She grabbed me out of my dorm room to make me listen to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard. I had no idea who she was! That's how we became friends.

I didn’t get pregnant right away. I started tracking my cycle and it took like two to three cycles to get pregnant. When you're trying and you don't become pregnant, it feels like a failure. You know it's ridiculous but, it’s how it feels. I was so sad those first three times.

My last cycle before I got pregnant was like the worst period of my life! I was in so much pain, I accidentally overdosed an ibuprofen. I mean I didn't overdose; I just took too much so went to the doctor as I was nauseous and felt terrible. Luckily there was nothing wrong with my kidneys. Then I got pregnant with my eldest, Zara, in the next cycle. It was easy.

With our second, Nora, it was two years later. We were starting to think about having another one. I took another three cycles to get pregnant with Nora because I remember being at my family friend Noelle’s wedding and thinking maybe I was pregnant and then getting my period on the way in the air on the flight back, sitting next to my brother, Kevin. I wasn’t exactly going to share about my period with him. When you're trying to get pregnant and you don't get pregnant, it's hard. I hadn’t even lost a pregnancy. I think it’s just when you take that leap of faith, it feels like a loss anyway.

I got pregnant on the third cycle and that was easy too. It was 2005, about two and a half years after I had Zara, Nora was born and that's when I started having health issues. I broke my foot about seven months after her birth, then I had a ruptured ovarian cyst, my back started hurting and my life changed dramatically.

I’d always wanted a third child but it was on the back burner with all of my health issues. By the time, my little sister, Patty, started trying to get pregnant with her first child around 2007, I thought, “That's kind of what I want to do.” I started trying to get pregnant again. But, I was on pain medicine, so I was nervous about getting pregnant on them. Then I was getting steroid injections for back pain. I was getting these epidurals that would mess with my cycle. Finally, I spoke up to the doctors and said, “You know I'm trying to get pregnant, right?”

They said, “Oh, well we should stop doing those injections then.”

“Well, that’s helpful. Thank you. Um, oh my God.” I’m glad I eventually spoke up!

I finally got pregnant in 2010. I had been trying since 2007. It was March, 2010. Before I got pregnant, I kept thinking, “Maybe it's just not God's plan,” because I was not the same person I used to be before I had the ruptured ovarian cyst. Nothing was the same anymore. I didn't sleep well. I had chronic pain. It sneaks up on you like the frog in the proverbial boiling water. You don't notice how bad it is until you feel better. And I didn't feel better. I saw a therapist once around that time and I remember she asked me, “Well, what would make you feel better?” and I said, “Having a baby.” The depression had become all-consuming simply from the fact that I wanted another baby and it wasn't happening.

In addition, I was in pain. I couldn't do the things that I used to be able to do. Everything was an effort. I think that's when I started a business with my sister. I was so grateful that I had our business to focus on so that there was something that I was accomplishing because there was so little that I was able to accomplish in the rest of my life.

Before I had Nora, I was finishing my novel and trying to get it published. Then I got toppled by my health issues. So, when I got pregnant, it didn't even feel real. I thought, “No way!” It's funny. I can't even really remember if I told Frank, my husband, the same way I told him about the other kids. When I found out I was pregnant with Zara, I got a silver baby spoon and did the same thing with Nora. I must've done the same thing. I think I had an extra spoon lying around. So, after three long years, I was pregnant.

I think I was like seven weeks. I was nauseous. I didn't feel great. I was tired. But the problem is when you're in chronic pain, you’re always tired and feeling terrible. There were so many times that I thought maybe I was pregnant. I mean you're trying every month, so you're always so hopeful. But I didn't officially track my cycle the same way. With Nora, I got to the point where I just knew how to do it.

I was seven weeks because we saw Dr. Noiret twice and we never heard the heartbeat. The first time we went, I knew that there wasn't a heartbeat yet. There was something there, but it was too early to hear the heartbeat. But, the second time, it wasn't too early to hear the heartbeat and so that's when we learned it was likely not going to be viable.

During the appointment, Dr. Noiret said, “Oh I can see it coming away.” He could see my lining coming out on the ultrasound. It was one of the nicest things someone did for me when I had the miscarriage. It was the kind of information that I needed because then I knew it was real. There was no hope. Without him telling me that, I would have worried about it forever. I had a friend who had a miscarriage and her sister tried to convince her not to get a D&C because “The doctors could be wrong.” As in, the baby could have survived if not for the D&C. But a good doctor knows when it's not viable. There should be a heartbeat at seven weeks and there was not one in either case.

Right after I found out, I had a family ski vacation with my parents and siblings and their families up in VT where we always went skiing together for Spring Break. I felt like I already knew what a miscarriage felt like because my mom had had one and so did my sister. I was glad that I had this familiar family ritual of skiing around the miscarriage.  I remember being in the hot tub with my family after skiing and hoping that it would start on its own because it wasn't. So, I had to go back down to NYC for a D&C during the vacation.

After that trip, the second week of spring break I went home to Ohio and I spent a week at my parents. Nora was five and Zara was seven. They probably had two weeks off for Spring Break. and spent a lot of time the window seat of my parent’s house. It’s my favorite part of their house, my childhood home. I spent a lot of time there. I remember being sad. I knew that I needed to be sad and I took that week to grieve in the safest place in the world for me. So I had a week with my family and then a week in the home that meant safety to me. It was really sad, but I was okay.

I remember when my brother and his wife, Diana, told me they were pregnant with Wallace. I'd already had the miscarriage. I knew they felt bad telling me. You can tell people feel bad being pregnant when you just had a miscarriage, but I was very excited for them.

Frank, my husband, is such a sweet, sweet man. He has always been great about these sorts of things. When my faith waivers, his is there and vice versa. Just the other day, I said, “I need you to tell me it's going to be okay. It’s your turn to tell me.” It is one of the things that's wonderful about him as a husband. When the chips are down, we take turns worrying. He swears he saw a flicker in the first ultrasound. After the miscarriage he said, “I saw it winking at us. I saw the spirit. It will come.” He was always sure that we would have another one and that was really helpful.

My sister helped me too. Every once in a while, when you’re tired, you need someone else to pull you up. Having her take action about her fertility, helped me face all my fear and worry. When I got back, I went to see a fertility specialist she was seeing. At this point I was about to turn 40. I was 39 when I had the miscarriage. I was old and I thought, “My younger sister is looking into it for herself. It's been three years and it's not just the injections and medical procedures and all that stuff that’s stopping me from getting pregnant. Something else is going on.”

 While I'd been trying on my own, now I was going to get expert help, doing of all that stuff, making the doctors appointments, it kept me busy and from worrying too much. Plus, my sister and I launched our website and our blog.

Insurance paid for three rounds of IUI. So, we did that first. But I also was still trying to figure out my pain issues. I had tons of tons of pain around my uterus around my back. Everything was inflamed down there. I think I had a colonoscopy and blood drawn related to that and the doctor said, “Oh, by the way, your thyroid hormone (TSH) is a little bit high.” I think it was an eight.

Literally right before they were putting the sleeping juice in for the colonoscopy, she said this to me. I said, “The fertility doctor didn't care about that.” It’s funny, the fertility doctor made no mention of it, whereas the digestive doctor was like, “That's kind of high. That's not normal. It's abnormal.”

Here you have like a 39 year old, 40 year old woman, who's been trying to get pregnant for five years and her thyroid hormone is high. The fertility doctors did not think it meant anything at all. They basically said, “Whatever.” But I ignored them and went to go see an endocrinologist who coincidentally was pregnant, very pregnant. And she took one look at my levels and said, “Of course, that's why you're not pregnant”.

The endocrinologist put me on thyroid medicine. I kept going to see the fertility doctor and started doing the fertility IUI stuff.  It was bad. Like it hurt. I remember I was driving back to Ohio and I had to lie down the whole entire time — 8 hours! — because my uterus hurts so bad. I had ovarian cysts forming from the medicine. My body totally overreacted to the meds.

The second time I had the IUI, they cut the medicine in half. Every time I went in — they'd monitor you every week — they would cut the medicine in half. They kept cutting it in half because my body overreacted to the medicines. I’d been on the thyroid medicine for six months by the time my second IUI happened I think it was in June of 2011 when I found out I was pregnant like the week before Wallace, my nephew, was born.

I hadn't told Kevin and Diana yet. I wasn't telling anybody, and I certainly was going to steal Diana’s thunder. But the day that Wallace was born, Diana asked me, “So are you pregnant?” I said, “Uh, yeah.” I was worried about the possibility of a miscarriage in a way I wasn’t with my daughters. My sister had had a miscarriage too a few years back and before it happened, I had been so excited for her that I’d told everybody she was pregnant. When she miscarried, I felt SO guilty and then after I had a miscarriage, I felt so badly again for what I’d done. I didn't want to tell anybody we were pregnant, and I didn’t for the longest time!

I remember being with my in-laws for my father-in-law’s birthday. I was probably about six weeks pregnant or something, under 12 weeks. My sister-in-law spent like an hour telling me about all the “crazy Christians in Texas” having babies in their old age and how they all had down syndrome and blah, blah, blah. I thought, ”Oh my God, stop!” I was worried about something being wrong with the baby because I was 40 and on thyroid meds. I was worried the medicine could cause a miscarriage or major birth defects. It wasn't until the third trimester that I felt like I could breathe. Then I was worried about my sister because she got pregnant while I was pregnant. So, I was worried about her pregnancy on top of it. I couldn't relax. You can't relax once you've had a miscarriage.

I almost forgot! I had a scare with Zara when I was about 12 weeks along or more in my second trimester. I guess my first pregnancy wasn’t as easy as I said it was! Ha.I feel like we'd already heard the heartbeat, but then I passed a big clot of blood. We hadn't had a second scan yet because I was seeing a midwife. I remember talking to Zara for the first time in the shower, I said, “Please stay, please stay, please stay, please stay, please stay.” We had to wait like a couple hours to see the midwife. While we were waiting that’s when we bought our first couch together. What were we going to do? LOL. It was a little scary and the midwife was so relaxed about it. Horrible. She wasn't very good. She said, “Oh, sure. It's nothing, blah, blah, blah. Have you had a scan yet?” I said, “No”. We hadn't had the 20-week scan yet. The clot happened in between scans. When it happened, it made the pregnancy so real. Ugh, the blood. No, what made it real was the fear that I would never get to meet her.

Advice:

My advice is to trust your gut, always trust your gut. I really believe that being put on the Levoxyl medicine —the thyroid meds — is what got me pregnant with my third child, Heather. I’d been trying to get pregnant for five years. When I decided to try IUI, one of my oldest family friends, Noelle McNeal, said to me, “No one gets pregnant on IUI who has fertility issues.” I did at the age of 40 on the 2nd time after six months of being on the thyroid meds. Literally the day I got pregnant, I also had an initial consult appointment with a new fertility doctor. We met with him and afterward Frank said, “We're going to go with this guy. He’s better.” I said, “Well, we have an IUI scheduled today. So no, we are going to go do the IUI today and we'll see what happens. If it doesn't go through, then we will go to this new doctor.”

My other advice is don't listen to negative people. Negative people will drag you down. Also, trust that whatever happens, you're going to be okay. I had so many health issues going on that I'm amazed I had another baby. Heather has been the biggest gift of my life. It's not been an easy nine years for us as a family financially. So, to have this amazing, happy, wonderful kid makes it all bearable. It's just so much easier to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you have a kid like Heather. Remember, when you're trying to go through to get to the light at the end of the tunnel, know it is there. You must keep that kind of attitude.