Mrs. Cookie's Blog

Umm, I just needed to add, for the person who googled “I got my cousin pregnant” and somehow stumbled on my blog, I’m really sorry for your predicament (unless it was on purpose, in which case… congratulations?).  Now I’m dying to know what post triggered my blog to show up on that search.  Also,  how many pages deep must this person have had to go to find my blog???

If you are stumbling across this post and wondering what it’s doing here, let me explain.  I wrote this post at the end of my pregnancy with Stowaway.  But, because I didn’t feel it was something my regular readers would be interested in reading about, I buried it back in the archives and didn’t tag it.  Still, the need to write it was urgent and to me, very necessary.  This post is for all of you who struggle with the stress or uncertainty that comes with losing an ovary before you have reproduced.  I hope that googling “getting pregnant after losing an ovary” will bring you right here, because when it happened to me, finding personal experiences was next to impossible (unless poorly spelled comments on health websites where the commenter referred to some “friend of a friend” count).

When I was in college (now just over 10 years ago), I had several weeks of intense, painful shooting pains in my abdomen.  I was poor and had really bad health insurance, so I kept ignoring the pains.  Off to the ER I went one night when the pain was nearly unbearable (don’t do that guys.  ER bills are always going to be TEN TIMES WORSE than going to a clinic before things get really bad).  13 hours later, I had my diagnosis:  an ovarian cyst.  It was so huge that the doctor wanted me to get it removed, like, yesterday.

It all happened really quickly.  I went back home to meet up with a doctor there (who my mom found for me) and he decided to schedule the surgery for shortly thereafter.  His goal was to just remove the cyst, but he warned me ahead of time that if the cyst was too ingrown then he would have to remove the whole ovary and tube.  I woke up from that surgery with one ovary.

From that moment until just about a year and a half ago, I also used hormonal contraceptives to prevent further cysts.  He assured me that when I did decide to start having kids, my left ovary would just start ovulating every month.  He also promised that being on hormonal contraceptives would not affect my ability to reproduce over the long term.  Plenty of family members had anecdotal stories about “someone they knew” who had been on birth control for year and had a really hard time conceiving.

That is why, for years, I was convinced that it was going to be next to impossible to get pregnant.  And, listen, if you have other factors that affect your fertility, then it might be more difficult.  I don’t want to claim that it will be a piece of cake for everyone.  I just want to reassure you that having one ovary in and of itself should not create a problem, any more than taking hormonal birth control for long periods of time will.

In the summer of ’11, Mr. Cookie (who, coincidentally, I started dating just before my surgery) and I decided we were finally ready to start trying to conceive.  I went off of birth control the previous winter, because I was so convinced that it would take months and months to get it out of my system.  For inquiring minds, when I was first on birth control, it was Ortho Tri-Cyclen, which later changed to the Nuva Ring.  Out of curiosity, I used OPKs (ovulation predictor kits) the first two months to see if my body was ovulating, and it was.  Apparently I didn’t need to go off the birth control quite so soon. 

6 months after going off birth control, we were poised to start trying.  The month before we were planning to start officially trying, we got lazy twice and didn’t use a condom.  I think we both figured “well, there’s no way it’ll happen the first time.”  In my estimation, this was the first time in my life I’d had sex without any protection.  And, surprise surprise, two weeks later we got our positive pregnancy test.

Now, I want to say one thing.  Does this mean that it will be as easy for you?  Not necessarily.  Your underlying fertility will have a lot to do with it.  How regular your periods are (since going off birth control, mine were always between 25 and 27 days apart), how predictable your discharge is (it should get thicker, more clear, and stickier somewhere in the middle of your cycle), your sex drive, and many other things can indicate how fertile you are.  If something seems off, get it checked out.  Always trust your body.  And, best wishes to you!!

I have a lot of things to write about:

• Starting a side cake business.
• Starting a new school year.
• Acadia (I’m blaming that one on Mr. Cookie- he’s the official picture downloader in the household and he still hasn’t!)
• Theatre exploits.

But, they’re all going to have to wait.  Life is keeping me from blogging.  I swear I’m still alive though.