Let me start by saying thank you for all the congratulations and sweet messages. I had my final year exams at uni this past weekend so I may have not responded to everyone yet. But I will! I just really wanted to focus on this as I can’t afford to fail any exams. I will be 8 months pregnant when I will be able to retake them if I fail. I certainly don’t want to and shouldn’t fly in the last trimester. Now that it’s all done and dusted I wanted to share with you the story and our journey of falling pregnant with our first baby.
The reason why I wanted to share the story of this pregnancy with you is because it is quite an unusual one. There is a reason why we consider this baby our little miracle. 🙂 A bit of a back story first though… At the age of 19 I was diagnosed with the polycystic ovary syndrome. Back then I had never heard of it before, neither did I know anyone who had it. I started researching, reading about it and many things suddenly started making sense to me. What was surprising to me was the fact that many women suffer from it, but none of my friends have ever shared this with me or spoken out about their problem. I knew I had a problem and that I needed to adjust and change a couple of things in my life if I wanted to be healthy. The crucial thing was changing my diet and exercising routine as this can really help with the symptoms. I stared reading about it and working on myself but believe me, this was a long process. Once I finally had this more or less in order and started taking regular contraception, which regulated my periods, the symptoms weren’t really affecting me that much. It’s true that my hair isn’t as thick as it used to and my skin can get oily but apart from that it is all manageable. I consider myself quite lucky in that respect.
Fast forward to January 2019, I went to the doctor for a regular belly scan and while he was doing the scan he was asking me questions which I found slightly bizarre. He started off by asking me if I was currently on contraception. I told him I was on the pill. He didn’t look convinced and asked if I had just started. I said that I have been on hormonal contraception for a few years now. Then he asked me if I recently had a break and started the pills again. Again, I said no, I have been on contraception for a few years now. After the scan he told me that my body doesn’t look like I have been taking any contraception at all. My pills weren’t working and he told me I needed to change them as soon as possible. He also said that my polycystic ovary syndrome was pretty severe and that I would really struggle to get pregnant and if I started thinking about kids we would need to start hormonal therapy and I needed to consider IVF.
It was a bit of a shock for me and a huge disappointment because if there was one thing I was sure about in this life, it was that I wanted to be a mother. I called my boyfriend and we had a long conversation about this because I also felt like in a way I was disappointing him because he did tell me he wanted to have children in the future. I’ve only briefly mentioned ‘hormonal issues’ to him before. He was very understanding and very positive that when the time was right the baby would come and he had no doubt that we could do this when we decided this was something we wanted. I sent him a few links to read about the syndrome that I have so he understood a bit better what we were dealing with and he was very much on board especially looking into the PCOS diet. We decided to finish the pills I had, I think I only had 3 pills left in that box, wait for my period and start taking different pills.
I will end here for today as this post has ended up being much longer than I expected. 🙂
If you have any questions about the above or have had the same problems, please know that you’re not alone. Plenty of women struggle in silence as the symptoms of PCOS can me embarrassing to some.
K.
