Hello i just signed up here because i read maybe it would help me with cope with everything and maybe make new friends who can empathize... so hopefully it works. Ill give you a little background I'm 30 and my husband is 36, he has a child from a previous marriage.. but it took them 7 years to finally get pregnant. He and I weren't the most responsible when we first met two years ago, never used protection from the start... we were just madly in love and didn't even question it..... So I guess after the first year I was very concerned why I hadn't gotten pregnant yet thought maybe it was we were having too much sex..there are never any fertility issues in my family. I have always had regular 28 day cycle period on noise always on time periods.But he is a graphic designer with no insurance, and I am a cosmetologist we live in the middle of no where missouri so pay isn't the greatest so we are in the process of moving to St. Louis where I am from and looking for jobs only with insurance so we can go to the doctors and figure out whats going on. Also in January of this year we FINALLY found out we were pregnant. It was so wonderful to tell him, he cried and was so cute and was so excited and I was SOOO happy for it to be our time, my mom was so excited. My father and his parents are all deceased so the more time that went on the pressure is on me to give my mom a grandbaby. So when we got pregnant I already started a new job, in a town away from my family, and already started normal college classes so i would be gone for 12 hour days and stress from work my husband and my mom and I trying to figure out the best situation for the baby got so overwhelming and my raging hormones I believe caused me to have a miscarriage at 9 weeks. Its not something you'll ever expect when you finally waited to have a family until you were older. its like I was so scared and was so cautious not to get pregnant until i was older and was with the right one. Finally you get pregnant and now you feel like the bad guy that let everyone down. I feel like a failure and I broke everyones heart. Anyways its now October and i should have gave birth two weeks ago. And I'm so depressed now, We have been paying attention to my most fertile days on my app on my phone but other than that I don't know all the lingo that goes with ttc forms.. if you could let me in just pretend you're trying to explain it to a 10 year old lol. give me advice at simple things that could help i don't know anything besides you just have sex every other day on your fertile days... I know I sound stupid.. just didn't think it would be so hard to have a baby. we are women its supposed to come naturally. Sorry for rambling just am trying anything ... thanks for reading
Gina
First of all, I am so sorry for your loss.
Early pregnancy loss is almost always caused by an issue with the fetus, such as a genetic abnormality. It is incredibly unlikely that any stress you were feeling at the time caused the miscarriage. It is much, MUCH more likely that the baby was never going to survive from the beginning. So as hard as it is, please try not to blame yourself.
Even with a regular 28 day cycle, you might not ovulate when your phone app says you're going to. The apps assume that women ovulate at the "normal" time (cycle day [CD] 14). You might be ovulating earlier or later than that. Charting is an easy way to track your personal ovulation and doesn't require insurance or any medical help. There are charting apps you can use (Fertility Friend was my favorite) that allow you to track your fertility signs, when you have sex, etc.
If you start charting, you will learn that there are common fertility signs experienced by most women around the time of ovulation. That includes egg white cervical mucus (EWCM), which is a vaginal discharge that's thin, stretchy (you can stretch it between your fingers), and the color and consistency of egg whites. Checking your cervical mucus (CM) daily is one way to see whether you're about to ovulate.
You can also use ovulation prediction kits (OPKs). You can buy OPKs near the pregnancy tests at any store (i.e. Walmart). They are about the same price as pregnancy tests and you use them pretty much the same way. OPKs test for a hormone in your urine called LH. Every woman gets a surge of LH before she ovulates, usually 1-2 days before ovulation. You usually start taking the OPKs on CD10 and continue on until you get a positive and/or stop getting positives. You can usually assume that you will ovulate 1-2 days after your first positive (however, that's not the case for everyone, as, for example, I ovulate 5-6 after my first positive OPK).
You can also keep track of your basal body temperature (BBT). A woman's BBT changes during the month based on her hormones. You take your BBT (using either a special BBT thermometer or a regular thermometer that reads to the tenth decibal) first thing every morning BEFORE getting out of bed and record it. If you use an app like Fertility Friend, it will automatically create a graph of your BBT, which is a very useful visual. Once you have ovulated, you will notice a rise in your BBT (usually 0.4 degrees or more). That is because the hormone progesterone increases dramatically after ovulation and progesterone causes our temperature to rise.
Ideally, your CM, BBT, and OPK results should all coincide--that is, you should see on a chart that you got fertile cervical mucus the same day you got a positive OPK and your temperature rose a day or two after that. At that point, you can be sure that you have ovulated. If you do that for a couple of months, you will start to notice patterns, such as if you ovulate consistently (some women don't) and if you ovulate at the same time every month. All of that information is also VERY helpful for a doctor to have, if you eventually go in for fertility treatments. Some doctors will have you start charting, if you aren't already.
If you've confirmed that you're ovulating regularly and timing sex right, then it could very well be an issue with your partner (which also sounds possible given how long it took him to conceive his first child). At least 30% of infertility cases are because of male infertility. It could be that your partner has a low sperm count or poor sperm morphology. That is something that a doctor can test using a sperm sample. At least for us, it was a relatively inexpensive procedure (maybe $100?).
Best of luck!
