I do not recall why I was in my OBGYN office, but all I knew was that I was going through my first ever transvaginal ultrasound. I was not mentally or physically prepared for this. At one point I asked the technician “how much longer?” Although I know it wasn't a long appointment (based on the clock), but in my head and watching the screen in silence with the technician taking multiple photos, it felt like an eternity.
I was given a room to wait for the doctor to review the results from the ultrasound with me. At this point, I was at a large medical practice in the DFW area. The office and doctor came highly recommended on the local Facebook groups. I was feeling confident that the doctor was going to come in and say “everything looks good, see you in a year.”
When the doctor came into the room, she had photos from my scan. She showed me one of my ovaries explaining how this is what it normally looks. She then proceeded to show me my other ovary and explain that all the black and white dots were signs that I had PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome).
At that point, the doctor asked me questions like “have you had irregular periods?” which the answer was yes. “Do you have acne?” which at that point, my acne had resolved after years of going to a dermatologist (and trying countless medications and topical treatments) to relieve my acne and scarring.
I remember leaving the appointment and calling my mother and letting her know that the doctor informed me of having PCOS.
This news was somewhat important since family members have been having similar symptoms since they were a lot younger, but they were never scanned for it. After this point, I was able to recommend that my cousin and aunt have a conversation with their doctor about getting screened for PCOS.
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The beginning of online research began. This is where I first learned that another symptom of PCOS is infertility. At this point, my husband and I were about to hit 2 years of marriage and had just survived a massive global pandemic. We had huge goals and ideas of starting a family one day and even bought a house with a room that we labeled the nursery. After doing more research, we learned that there is still a chance we could get pregnant naturally, but if we could not on our own after a year, that was when we needed to call my doctor to talk about options for starting a family.
At this point, we wanted to start a family, but not immediately. We were waiting until we felt like we were in a good place with our relationship, careers, and town.
At this point, I was also working a very stressful job that caused even more stress on not only me, but our relationship. It took until summer 2021 to officially start job hunting. I started a new job in September 2021.
Once we started feeling like we understood what this new life was looking like (and I was feeling comfortable with my new career), we started talking more details about starting a family. We talked about things like when we would start trying (or rather not preventing pregnancy), how we would track ovulation/testing, when we would start trying to start a family more seriously, etc.
At this point, I was convinced that I was going to have trouble conceiving and possibly infertility, so we were taking it slow at the beginning of the journey and just seeing what happens. We started not preventing pregnancy in May 2022.
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