Nervously introducing myself

laurenjh22

Hi everyone! I’m Lauren :) Just thought I’d introduce myself.
I’m 30 years old and me and my partner have been off birth control for 17 months, actively TTC for just over a year. I was on the pill for 9 years, so expected things to take a little while to balance out, but I didn’t think we’d still be trying this far along the line.
I was a fresh-faced 19 year old when i started the pill and can honestly say I don’t remember much about what my cycles were like before. I seem to remember them being a little irregular, but in all honesty I never tracked them or really paid much attention to them at all, so who knows. If only I’d known then what I know now :/
What I do know is since coming off the pill my cycles have been a little all over the place. At first I put it down to my body trying to regulate and wasn’t too stressed, but the same can’t be said now.
I use OPKs, BBT (my holy grail :D ), CM and CP to track ovulation. For the most part I do ovulate every month (I’ve had 2 anovulatory cycles since I started charting but I’ve read that the odd one is nothing to be too concerned about?), but I often get more than 1 LH peak which is why I love BBT so much, and my ovulation day varies. Most commonly it’s between CD16-CD21, but I’ve had a few cycles it’s happened later than this - current cycle I O’d on CD34 and am presently 6DPO. This is the longest cycle I’ve had since September last year. My luteal phase is usually 14 days long.
In March last year I was sent to a gynaecologist because of some left pelvic pain I was having which turned out to be an ovarian cyst. By November the cyst had gone by itself and at that point they referred me to the fertility clinic. We had our initial consultation there last week, where they did bloods and another ultrasound and found another 5cm cyst, again on my left ovary. Just like last year they are happy to keep the cyst under surveillance for now to see if it goes away on its own. Other than that one cyst and a retroverted uterus (normal anatomical variation, so I’m told), everything else on my ultrasound looked normal. My partner is booked in for a semen analysis next week and then we’ll have a follow up appointment with a consultant to go through all our results and go from there.

The TTC journey has become a real mental struggle for me, as I’m sure it does for many people on here. At first I stayed quite chilled and enjoyed charting and getting to know my body again after so long on the pill. But the longer it took the more stressed I started to become. As time’s ticked on and the months pass I feel more and more lonely. I’m surrounded by pregnant friends and family and I see a new pregnancy announcement almost daily on my Instagram. Like many people I’m guessing, I always took having a baby for granted, like it was a given and would happen just like that *clicks fingers*. I never imagined I’d be where I am now.

Anyway if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. It feels good to get everything out sometimes. Hope I can also be a support to others on here.