The Test You Can’t Study For

Last month I wrote a post about the emotional toll of getting a negative result on a pregnancy test. That post was supposed to be the first of a series of posts about dealing with infertility in a foreign country. However, I forgot to mention it. So, I’m gonna do what any good writer would and say that this blog post is the first in the series.

Also, spoiler alert: Our infertility treatments worked and we have a wonderful baby boy.

But let me take you back to 2014, when my husband and I started down what felt like the never-ending yellow brick road.

Due to what was probably an administrative error, I got the wrong birth control. Cue raging mood swings, feeling crazy, and overall not being a pleasant human being to be around. I could write a whole post about my outrage at someone screwing up a patient’s medicine, the fact that I had to catch the mistake, their lack of willingness to simply change it, and the waste of my time and sanity due to someone else’s error—but I’ll refrain.

When I found out what happened, my husband and I decided this was the perfect time to start trying to get pregnant. It started off as simply not taking my birth control. When that didn’t work, we started tracking my cycle (there are plenty of apps out there for this). In the meantime, we kept hearing about people we knew getting pregnant, and we started to wonder why it wasn’t happening for us.

Seeing others experience the joy of having kids, while not only not being able to—but also not knowing why we couldn’t—was heartbreaking. Being around babies was both amazing and saddening. Still, I would rather be around babies than not.

To add to the heartbreak, we weren’t sharing the fact that we were having issues. This is literally what our biology is for—to procreate. How can we not accomplish this?!

I felt like a failure.

How could I not do something my body was made for?

One day while having lunch with a friend, she vented to me about her frustrations. It turns out that she and her husband were trying to get pregnant as well and were having trouble. I confided that Chris and I were having the same issue. I also told her that she was the only one I had mentioned this to. She pushed me to talk to more people about what we were going through.

I’m so glad she did.

Once we started talking about it, it was like a small weight lifted off our shoulders (if I haven’t said it before, thank you again for that push).

With this newfound support, we decided to get tested to see if there were any reasons why we weren’t getting pregnant.
Once we made the decision, I was the first to get the ball rolling. I started where any logical person would—by making an appointment with my doctor.

Tip: If you’re using TRICARE, you havve to have been trying to get pregnant for at least a year before they will test you. When we got tested, they had yet to invent a way to check how long you’d been trying to conceive… just saying.

I took the morning off work, drove 30 minutes away, waited in those uncomfortable chairs, and then got called back. I met with a physician’s assistant who started by asking me questions. I was prepared for the first one—how long had we been trying? But the next one threw my morning off—she asked if my husband had been tested.

He had not, so I told her as much, not thinking anything of it. That’s when she informed me that they’d not be testing me that day. In fact, they wouldn’t test me until my husband not only got tested, but also got the results back. She explained to me that it’s easier and cheaper to test men. However, she couldn’t explain to me why I wasn’t informed of this when I called to make the appointment.

Remember those mood swings I mentioned earlier? It took all my emotional strength to not chew the physician’s assistant out for this ridiculous policy. I mean, I was there, I had insurance, why couldn’t they simply test me? It felt like I was being led around in circles. It’s difficult enough to deal with infertility, without having your time wasted.

Tip: Most insurance won’t test the woman if the man hasn’t been tested first. Make sure you have the results from the man’s test before making an appointment to get the woman tested.

I held my tongue and instead vented to Chris, who promptly went and got tested. We got the good news that there was nothing wrong with his—um…—sample.

Time for me to be tested.

There are three tests for women, which means three separate appointments and waiting for results before moving onto the next test. First came the blood tests, then a test to check that there are no blockages in your fallopian tubes (using dye and an x-ray), and lastly, a procedure to check your fallopian tubes, ovaries, and uterus.

I got through two of the three tests when we got the news that we would be moving to Germany. My last test would have to wait until we got to our new home.

Stay tuned for the next chapter: Was Ist Fertility?