Side note – As I am writing this, I’m focusing on this specific journey, which was very hard. However, I have to remember there were a lot of good things happening during this time, too. I continued to love teaching, Seth (finally) finished residency and enjoyed his new job at the clinic. We had good community, we traveled, and we tried to embrace the freedoms that came with no children. However, the journey to parenthood was hard, and that is the part of our story that I’m telling. Please know that there were good things, and we were not blind to them.
Eventually, we were faced with no other option than to return to the doctor, so off we went again. For a variety of reasons, I chose another new doctor. Within one visit, we discovered that I did not properly heal from my first surgery. Therefore, she suggested that I have another surgery to clear up the scar tissue that was “clogging things up.” She said this was likely the reason why things still hadn’t worked, but she also suggested since I was already going under, to have the surgeon check to see if I had endometriosis. Endometriosis is a condition where the lining of the uterus starts to grow outside the uterus and into the rest of the body. Sounds painful, right? It is. As least, I have heard that it is. I have a wonderful, dear friend who has it, and life basically has to stop for her once a month as she tries to endure the pain that medication only sort of helped with. I never had any of these symptoms, but I was willing to check in order to rule it out.
And wouldn’t you know it. I had stage 3 endometriosis.  
What?
I can’t even describe how disappointed I was to wake up from that surgery and learn that. I struggled to understand how I could have stage 3 with no symptoms, and apparently – there are very few women for whom this is true. I am grateful to not have the awful symptoms, but I also wish I could have had a warning that this was a possibility. Does that make sense? All of a sudden, we were faced with so many more questions with a lot harder answers. Knowing that I had this, we knew that we would probably not conceive naturally. There is a chance that things can improve after the surgery, but our doctor urged us to think of IVF.
We had thought about IVF before, but until now we never thought it would really be our only option.  
So we took time to digest this information. We took time to pray. And while I know lots of people have their opinions about IVF – I’m honestly not interested in hearing any of them. What I know is that after a lot of prayer and a lot of research, it seemed like that path we were supposed to go down.
So, we put ourselves on the list, we paid for it, we started getting the medications (not cheap), we prayed, and prayed, and prayed some more.  
And then we started.  
And honestly the process wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Yes – it’s a lot of shots, but I’m not squeamish about that, and my doctor husband wasn’t exactly a novice in giving injections. In fact – while the shots can make some woman crazy – I thought they were making me supremely happy. I don’t know if it was the meds, or if I was just excited to feel like I was in control and doing something active to finally achieve what we wanted, but I felt energized throughout the process. Yes – getting to appointments was hard (you have appointments/blood draws/sonograms just about every day), but we made that work, too.  
And finally – the process was done. And when it’s done, there is a two-week wait before a pregnancy can be confirmed.  
So we waited
 and hoped
 and prayed
And finally – the two week wait was over.