Mary's Story Posted Dec 11, 2007 On the morning of Christmas Eve 2006, I stood in the bathroom staring at the first BFP I had seen in all of my 31 years - 8 of which I spent TTC (trying to conceive). My husband and I were relatively young when we began our journey to have a family: I was 23 and he was 27. We tried to just relax and let it happen for a few years, and then we moved on to ovulation monitors, and eventually 3 IUIs with clomid. None of them worked. We had many tests, but our diagnosis was simply unexplained. This drove me nuts, as I like to know how things work (or why they DON'T work in our case). How can you fix a problem if you don't even know what causes it? We next tried IVF, and I responded well (33 eggs). We put back 2 great embryos, but it was a BFN. We froze 4 and 3 looked good enough to put back one month later, but none of them stuck, either. We were devastated. It seemed like it would never happen, that whatever was causing the problem was insurmountable. I went into a depression for nearly a year. It felt like there was a constant weight on my chest. I cried a lot and tried to seek counseling, but my counselor (with pictures of her two cute girls all over her office) had no idea what I was going through. Her advice? Learn how to be happy without kids... lame. Finally, in October of 2006, we decided to try IVF once more. This was the cycle from hell. All sorts of things went wrong, and any other doctor would have cancelled it, but my RE was willing to push on through all of it. In the end, only 2 eggs fertilized (with ICSI) and we put back both on a 2 day transfer. I had very little hope that it would work. After all, if the perfect cycles didn't, why would such a messed up one do the trick? I was 9dp2dt on the morning of Dec. 25th, and shocked when the 2nd line showed up on the FRED (first response early detection - a home pregnancy test). As a backup, I dipped 2 other tests in the same urine sample and they both were positive, too. My pregnancy was uneventful, and my wonderful daughter Mia Michelle made her arrival in less than 3 hours on 9/7/07. I can truly say that she was worth the wait, the time, the effort, and the money. I thought it was impossible and it all seemed so overwhelming many times. My advice to anyone who is still TTC is to stay focused, and keep trying no matter how downtrodden it makes you feel. You CAN have a family, one way or the other. Sometimes it will be the hardest thing you will ever do, but anything this good is worth the effort. As a side note, after 31 years without a BFP, 6 weeks after my daughter was born, I became pregnant again. It was a chemical pregnancy, but I was shocked that conception had occurred. Life is full of surprises.