Not sure how to cope...?

Question

Hubby and I have been TTC since March. I have endometriosis and I've been seeing a naturopath for two years. She's stopped my painful periods and she's helping me with TTC. The last two months I've had sore boobs with very dark veins on them, exhaustion, nausea, all of which I know are both PMS and pregnancy symptoms. AF is also now turning up late as well, which has been getting my hopes up because of the symptoms. The naturopath says that symptoms are a good sign because I have enough hormones racing through me to help me TTC, but I've been devastated the last two months because I've never had PMS symptoms before and keep thinking I'm pregnant. How do I deal with the disappointment each month? I know I shouldn't stress, but is anyone else in the same position - going from no PMS symptoms to all of a sudden having PMS symptoms that mirror pregnancy symptoms and thinking they're pregnant, just to be let down?

Answer 1

There really isn't a good answer for this. TTC is a huge roller coaster of emotions. I know that with endometriosis, I had pregnancy symptoms every single month. The worse my endo got, the worse the symptoms were. Every single month I was late and every single month I was severely dissapointed that I wasn't pregnant. I had 10 friends get pregnant on accident in a 2 year period while I was desperately ttc.
My only advice is that if you find yourself getting obsessed and it's hurting your relationship with your SO, then it's time to take a break. It takes a really long time to get pregnant when you have endometriosis. You should give it a full year before consulting with a fertility specialist. Make sure your husband gets tested too. We didn't do that for a couple of years. We found out he had problems too. It would have saved us a lot of time and heartache if we had him tested right away. Between his low sperm count and my stage 3 endometriosis, we couldn't get pregnant on our own.

After 4 years of ttc and 2 rounds of IVF, we are the proud parents of 3 week old twins. A boy and a girl.

Answer 2

I went through infertility for almost 2 years. In the long run, I had to train myself not to think that every symptom was a great sign for pregnancy. I was driving myself (and my husband) batty. Once I felt a wave a nausea, ran to the kitchen to pull raw chicken out of the fridge and then sniffed and sniffed and sniffed that chicken hoping that it would make me throw up. When I didn't puke, I cried for hours. That's NOT normal! I can laugh about it now, but at the time, I was a total basket case.

I got to the point where I had to drop out of all my on-line TTC groups (I think I was in 3 or 4 of them). I steeled myself against even BUYING a home pregnancy test until my period was 3 days late. When I got sore breasts or whatever, I told myself over and over, "It's PMS, it's PMS, it's PMS."

But I continued to do all the testing I needed because I had unexplained infertility. On my 34th birthday, I insisted on the last test, which my OB/GYN said I didn't need because I didn't have the right "symptoms." Well, it gave me my answer: my immune system was killing off my husband's sperm within an hour.

Once I knew what was wrong, we were able to proceed with "fixing" it, and eventually conceived.

Your naturopath has surely explained to you that the process of overcoming endometriosis can take a very long time, and even then there can be a lot of scarring that can prevent implantation. Sometimes a naturopath can only take you so far -- they can get rid of new endometriosis but they can't fix the scarring that has already occurred. Have you had the test that proves your tubes are open? Sometimes that's an issue for endometriosis patients.

Anyway, I do recommend the mental training. It saved my sanity. It didn't mean that I didn't want a baby -- it didn't turn me into a permanent pessimist. But it got me through the most difficult years of our marriage.

We have three kids now, ages 8, 5 and 3.