Wooo Hooo, I love leaving the doctors encouraged!

Today was our appointment with the maternal fetal medicine doctor. Let me just start off by saying, he is truly amazing. Having a doctor tell me that their main priority is to help me have a healthy baby is enough to completely melt my heart. He was not only my superhero, but he understood where I was coming from and how much we have searched for someone to help us. He may not realize this, but he is truly a gift!

Okay, enough of the emotional part. Here is the results!

Today I am on day 20 of my cycle, 4 days past ovulation. (For those of you that have just started following my blog, Ovulation is huge!!! ) The treatment plan is based on keeping my blood from clotting so much, therefore the baby and my uterus have enough blood supply to sustain a pregnancy. I will take folgard, baby aspirin, prenatal, prometrium, and expectra until a positive pregnancy test. Once that stick shows positive I  drop the baby aspirin and switch to a better blood thinner that has less risks for baby. This is called Lovenox and is a low molecular heparin. I will remain on this until the 36th week of pregnancy. At that point we will switch to regular heparin so that I can have an epidural (you didn't think that after all of this I would do it naturally did you?) I will also remain on the prometrium until about 20 weeks. (It helps keep the uterus nice and fluffy for baby.)

It took a long time to get to this point, and alot of advocating for myself and my future baby. I knew what needed to be done as I have researched high and low the best treatments there are to treat MTHFR.  I kept up while being told doctors didn't want to help me, and I finally prevailed!

Here is the break down of what MTHFR is and how it effects you.
 Methylene-Tetra-Hydro-Folate-Reductase, also called MTHFR for short is a genetic defect that greatly effects your blood and how much it clots. Blood clotting is very serious in general and even more damaging when you are trying to carry a baby as it reduces the nutrients to the baby and does not allow them to grow. This essentially results in a miscarriage (which is what happened to us). The reason that I was tested for this was because we had 2 pregnancy losses and one after we heard the heartbeat. Once a heartbeat is heard, there is a less than 5% chance of pregnancy loss. Could we fit into that 5% without having MTHFR? Maybe, But testing for a bunch of genetic disorders would rule that out. Low and behold, 20 some vials of blood later, I tested positive for the most severe MTHFR called  homozygous C677T. This means that not only do I have one defective gene, I have 2! ( to bad my chances weren't better in something good, like winning the lottery, lol) Having both mutations means that both of my parents carry this genetic defect. Think of the punnett square in high school. This also means that there is a chance that my sisters carry some part of the mutations as well. Or maybe they got lucky and will not get it at all. ( I pray for this all the time, that I can deal with it all so they don't have to). Neither of my parents have been tested, so I do not know at this point if one of them is also homozygous, or if they just have one mutation. It is important that they all remain aware that its possible they have it, because this genetic defect can cause stroke, heart attack, blood clots, aneurysms, deep vain thrombosis, and some other things. I did write about this more in some earlier posts when we first found out. I have came a long way since then and plan to continue to keep up my positive vibes!


As you can tell, I have now decided to share our journey with the world. Not because I want pity of any sort, but because there are so many women out there who are going through this that are to embarrassed to speak up and advocate for what they believe. You are the only one who knows your body the way that you do.  There is nothing embarrassing about infertility, everyone has their journeys, and this is ours!