The Story of How We Became Six (Part Two)

After deciding to have children soon after getting married, my husband and I "practiced" for several months. When we didn't get pregnant, we finally went to our doctor and that was the start of our journey to kids.

I say journey to kids because that is exactly what it was, a journey. We went through screenings and procedures to find out why I was not getting pregnant. Ultimately, we discovered that we had fertility issues on both parts so we opted to utilize technology.

We started with inseminations. The process consisted of taking fertility medication to stimulate my ovaries (hoping to produce viable eggs), then, injecting me with a medication to help release the eggs from the ovaries. After that, my husbands "release" was then injected into me in hopes that all would come together.

After five failed attempts, the fertility specialist thought that the only thing that could help would be in-vitro fertilization.

In the Fall of 2001, 2 years after initially starting to try to get pregnant, we underwent the process of doing in-vitro. The process is long and it took a toll on us.

I'll never forget it. My husband had to give me shots twice a day and because they were time sensitive, there were some interesting places he would have to administer them at. Like, during football season, my husband had to give me a shot in the parking lot at a UH football game. And, there were the times that my husband was stuck at work and I would have to get the shots in the nurse's exam room at the prison.

We did what ever we could to make it happen and then, in December of 2001, my procedure to extract the eggs, fertilize them, and then return them into me occurred. We put 3 fertilized eggs in and we froze the remaining eggs. We found out 2 weeks later that the eggs did not implant and my first in-vitro failed. It was devastating.

Six months later, we put the frozen eggs in, hoping that those would take and we would get pregnant. They didn't. Again, we were devastated.