I got my first ever BFP on Jan 13, the day before we were scheduled to go for an initial IVF consultation! Here is our story:
My husband and I are both 31 and after 15 years on the pill, I came off at the end of Jan 2014. All of my friends were starting to have kids and my husband had been subtly hinting that he was feeling ready for a few months. At first my cycles were short (24 days) with spotting for almost a week followed by only a day or 2 of heavy flow. After 4 months of this I went to my doctor and expressed my concerns for the short cycle and spotting. I am an alarmist and felt sure that something was terribly wrong. She was not concerned about my cycles and told me to try using OPK strips, relax, drink lots of water, eat healthy, etc. and call her back if I wasn’t pregnant in a year. She also suggested that we get my husbands sperm tested, which we did. His results came back above normal for sperm count and on the low side for morphology, but nothing to be overly concerned about.
I turned to the internet and began googling everything nonstop for the next few months. In July I decided we would really get serious. We started using OPK’s, preseed, and I began taking Vitamin B6. My cycles lengthened to 26 days, however I was still spotting beginning exactly 5 days before my period every month. This lasted through the summer and fall, and was absolute torture. Between family asking when we were going to have kids already, and friends getting pregnant and giving birth within the same amount of time we’d been trying, I was really starting to feel the pressure. Every month I felt sure that we had timed it right, and was devastated when I would start spotting on cue.
We were coming up on a year, so I called my doctor in December and she referred me to a specialist for IVF. I’m not sure that I would have ever gone through with the procedure, we are normal, working class people and it would be been very hard for us to come up with the money. But something about having the appointment in place and knowing that we were going to explore other options must have put me at ease. The only thing that we did differently this month was that I began taking Vitex. I’m not sure that I can credit Vitex 100% for my BFP, but I definitely think it contributed. I noticed a ton of fertile CM the day I ovulated, which was something that I had never, ever experienced before. Whenever people would mention Egg White CM I always wondered what they meant and would analyze mine every month. Well, I really understood after that! I would recommend that anyone with similar spotting issues look into Vitex, I took 40 mg a day for 1 month before my BFP.
I did not keep track of all the details because I was distracted by the madness of returning to work after the holidays, but I distinctly remember having an abundance of white CM after ovulation, and a big glob of yellowish CM around 8 DPO (almost like a snot… gross, I know). I had never experienced that before, and remember thinking - could this be it?
Good luck everyone! I know how hard it is and how easy it is to get down. I wish I had some miracle cure to share - for me it just took time...