Infertility?

My fiance and I have always talked about wanting children. I always said "one". He always said "Maybe two". After over 7 years together and with wedding plans in the making we both had this image of our our life would be one day. We had years to talk about all the things you could ever think of like how we would raise our kids, what they would be like, what they would grow up and do, quirks each of us had that we hoped our children wouldn't inherit, along with many more visions and ideas.

But sometimes life doesn't always go exactly how you planned it. Here I am going to document just exactly how far from our plan things have gone.

So as I said, our plans have changed incredibly. We have been planning our wedding and going through all the motions to get prepared for our July 2012 wedding day. We are both so excited that after 7 years we are finally going to be continuing a new chapter of our life together. 

At the same time we have been attending a lot of doctors appointments, as we aren't sure what our healthcare will look like once the wedding takes place and we currently both have good coverage. 

Due to some health problems we have decided that we should go forward with some general fertility testing because after the wedding our insurance may not cover the testing at all. There was enough reason for us to consider doing this in advance, as opposed to waiting until after we were ready to try, like most couples do and most doctors advise. 

I wont go into a lot of details about the testing experience, but I will say that after a few weeks we got news that, as it turns out all our dreams about one (or two) kids seem to have been flushed down the toilet. The doctor gave us the news that we will likely struggle to conceive and that while we may still be able to have kids someday it could still take years and that even then if we wanted to have kids we may need to research IVF treatments as an alternative option.

Of course, none of this was ever a part of any of our talks, until now. We weren't planning to have kids anytime really soon, as we certainly want to get through the wedding, but now we are faced with this news that we might not have kids. It has never been a question that we will still be married, but our thoughts were turning to "What will happen now?" "Will we ever have a little family or will it be just us?" "Will we need to do IVF?" and after researching, we found out that IVF treatments are no joke, that's something we'll likely have to take a loan out on just to afford, as it's so incredibly expensive.

We told our immediate family about the news and it has been a rough time for everyone. Of course, our mothers are sad for us, as much as we are sad about the news. We have some hope that even though the doctor says years, maybe he is wrong and we have appointments to continue with some follow up testing, but things dont look as good as we could have hoped for. So I'm not sure where we go from here, other than that we will continue to seek answers and hopefully get some better news along the way.