John Shaughnessy / Courtesy of Jess King
When my partner, Sophia, and I first embarked on this adventure in March 2021, we didn’t realize exactly how difficult this process might be. We didn’t even really have the intention of getting pregnant immediately; we really just wanted to understand both of our fertility and be proactive about planning and understanding our bodies.
For me, it started with an egg retrieval. With the eggs that we (hopefully) got from the process, we planned to do a cycle of in vitro fertilization (aka IVF) or freeze my eggs. But the first retrieval was unsuccessful, so we did another one. This time, thankfully, it yielded three eggs — they weren’t perfect, but we decided to fertilize them and freeze them as embryos anyway, just in case. Next, I decided to see what my body would do with intrauterine insemination (IUI), a fertility treatment that involves inserting sperm directly into a person’s womb. We did the first round of IUI, but it was unsuccessful. So we did another IUI, but it was also unsuccessful.
By then, it was August or September, and I was starting to feel discouraged. A friend of mine recommended getting a saline ultrasound to look at my uterus, since it can help detect polyps, which are pretty common. (Uterine or endometrial polyps are growths, usually benign, that attach to the inner wall of the uterus, and they can impact fertility.) We did one, and my doctor found something that may or may not have been a polyp. So we decided to go through with endometrial scratching, a procedure where they essentially scrape the inside of the uterus. The thought is that this should make the inside of the uterus super sticky — and my doctors said that, a lot