Video: Secondary Infertility

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My name's Alyse Forselina. I'm 39 years old. I've been married five years now. I have a 3-year-old daughter, and am working on, hopefully, a second one. We've been working on a second one for about two years; two and one-half years. Of that two and one-half years, probably the first six months was trying to figure out exactly what was going on. I had uterine fibroids, and so I had to have that taken care of. And then we started to go into fertility cycles, so about a year and a half of direct fertility work. On the first time around, my husband and I were married about a year and we decided to wait about a year before we had our first child. We went on vacation to Puerto Rico. We got pregnant on the first try. It was very easy. It was an incredibly healthy and wonderful pregnancy. An easy birth, and everything went perfectly. So, the assumption was, of course, after that, that I would easily get pregnant the second time around. We waited about a year to start, and it took us awhile to get into the system and realize that we were having problems. So it was a real surprise to me. We tried for about three months and I went to my OB-GYN. She took a blood test. At the time I wasn't exactly certain what she was measuring, and she called me back and said that she was concerned. As it turned out, it was my FSH, probably, that she was looking at and she referred me to a fertility specialist. At the time, the doctor really thought as though probably my major problem was uterine fibroids, and that the uterine fibroids would have been preventing any embryo from attaching to the uterine wall. So there was a process of just trying to actually get those uterine fibroids removed. That took almost six months, because of, I have problems with my cycle—you have to do this surgery at the right time in terms of where your uterus was in your cycle. And because my cycles were so off, not realizing that that was actually one of the symptoms of low ovarian reserve, it took longer than I would have liked to to actually have that surgery And it wasn't really until after that surgery that I was actually diagnosed.