For years I have been told, I can’t have kids.  I shouldn’t have kids.  If I have kids they will be born with developmental disabilities or if I get pregnant I will just miscarry – so don’t bother trying.

I have suffered from eating disorders since I was 9 years old.  On top of that when I finally hit puberty I was one of the ‘lucky‘ few that got her period with a friend: endometriosis.  I suffered from age 16-26 with extreme cramping and monthly hospitalizations with the exception of the time that I was on depo-provera (the shot).  Yay again, the depo caused bone density loss so I had to stop taking it.  So I welcomed back excruciating pain but now due to the depo and many years of starvation and purging I only got my period once or twice a year. Good luck getting pregnant after doing so much damage to your body.

At age 30 along comes a new gyno.  He puts me in for a laparoscopy and burns off as much of the endo as he can.  He then puts me on Lupron hormone therapy with the hope of re-booting my cycle and getting rid of the endo.  Lupron is a whopping $450 per month and I was on it for 6 months.  OUCH !  Thankfully the majorityof it was covered by my extended medical plan.  Lupron is used for many things one of the great side affects is that after treatment you are supposed to be ‘super fertile for about 3 months.  The bad side affect is that in order to reboot my system it put me through menopause.  Yay for hot flashes and moodiness but also a highly increased sex drive (which definitely made for a happy boyfriend, even though he didn’t understand why I was sweating buckets in the middle of winter)  After Lupron I went back on a single dose of depo, I loved my boyfriend but we definitely weren’t together for long enough to be having babies.

During these three months we discovered that I had graves disease, yes I actually can have more things wrong with me.  I have to go for x rays, and swallow radioactive drinks so they can see if it really is graves or if it is some kind of cancer.  This is when the specialists tell me that children are not an option for me and I will probably have to drink radioactive iodine in which case I can’t even try to get pregnant for a year or I risk serious birth defects.  The wind was taken right out of my sails.  Just because I wasn’t ready to have kids, doesn’t mean that I didn’t want them ever, and being in my 30’s time was definitely running short.  I decided against the radioactive therapy and chose pills as an option instead.  My boyfriend and I became much more serious, we moved to Vancouver and I started seeing a new specialist, who was much more on board with my desire to one day have kids.

Two months after moving to Vancouver I was pregnant!  This is where our story truly begins.