Chapter One Preview

I started working on my book "Full Heart Empty Womb" this summer.  It chronicles my journey through infertility, how I coped, and what I learned through all the trials.  I hope to be finished writing the book in the next couple of months and have it published by early 2015.  I am very excited about the latest step in my journey.  Enjoy!

Chapter 1 – Boy Meets Girl

Spring 2005

Another night with a tear streaked pillow.  My hair is matted to my face where the tears have soaked my brown hair.  I have given up even wiping them because they are flowing so fast.  Occasionally a sob will erupt from my lips. I clutch my belly.  Half a prayer and half just to myself I cry, “Why can’t I be normal?  When will it be my turn?”.

Eric lays a supportive hand on my back.  I can tell he wants to say something but is at a loss for words.  So he just rubs my back and tells me he loves me and our day will come.  This goes on for hours.  Eric’s hand stays on my back but goes limp.  My tears slow until they are just all cried out.  Eventually exhaustion wins the night’s battle and I fall into a restless sleep.

I wake up the next morning with my eyes swollen from the night before.  I shower and dab some eye cream on my tired eyes in hopes that it will help them feel just a little better.  Eric looks at me and I can tell he wants to say something but just doesn’t know what to say.  He kisses my head, rubs my back and tells me to have a good day.  He assures me that today will be better and suggests that we go on a date this weekend.

I trudge down to my office wishing I was a coffee drinker.  Surely a jolt from a cup of joe would improve my morning.  I fire up my email ready to start my day at work.  I see a string of emails from girlfriends.  Apparently I am the last to see it.  The subject line: “Guess who is expecting??”.  And I am pulled right back under.  I have never been so thankful for my home office as the sobs overtake my body again.

January 1998 – University of Tennessee

Statistics class in college.  At respectable dinner parties that is where I tell people I met my husband, Eric.   It is what I hoped to tell my someday, maybe, hopefully, pretty please God, future children.  That isn’t a total lie.  We were in statistics class together but our first meeting was quite different.

Football season was over so the normal barrage of parties had died down.  After a month at home with our families for Christmas and an intense start of the Spring semester, my girlfriends and I were excited for a Saturday night of band parties on fraternity row.  It was one of those nights that you look back on ten years later and think, “That is what college was all about.”.

Always the planner, I was talking to my girlfriends and trying to figure out which houses we wanted to go to and the order in which we would hit them.  That was when Marguerite spoke up about making sure we hit the KA house before the night was over.  Word on the street was that late at night they would strip and go tarp sliding in the back yard.  Hello?  How could we pass that up?   Tarp sliding sounded like so much fun.  Add into that some naked co-eds?  Slam dunk for the evening!  There also happened to be a cute KA that I often saw around campus.

Our first and only stop that night would be where I met my future husband.  We got our off-brand red cups and went straight for the keg.  There was a great 80s cover band playing so we were in heaven.

And then there he was.  KA t-shirt guy.  Tall, dark, and handsome.  I tried to will him to look at me.  Please, please look at me.  Another song came on and I got the sense that someone who smelled very good was right behind me.  KA t-shirt guy?  Nope. He was still across the way completely oblivious of Steph.  My friends nodded in another direction, gave me an encouraging look and mouthed, “He’s cute!”.

I turned around and looked up into the most beautiful pair of green eyes I have ever seen.  He smiled and I was gone.  An adorable dimple appeared and his smile went straight up to his eyes.  I never understood how eyes could smile until I saw him.  Those eyes went from beautiful to amazing.

The rest of the night was a blur. I quickly fell head over heels for this guy named Eric. I learned Eric was from the same hometown as my friend, Sherrell, and also happened to be in my Statistics class.

Until now, Statistics class had been a means to an end.  But now…now I was absolutely giddy about going to Statistics class. 10:10 couldn’t get here quickly enough.  I actually showered and got dressed for class!  No ball cap.  No Nike pants and sweatshirt.  I was dressed to impress.

We dated until I graduated from the University of Tennessee a year before him.  We dated long distance for two years while he pursued his Masters in Accounting.  I moved to Louisville, Kentucky were I got a job in sales with General Electric. 

It was tough having a long distance relationship.  Especially since he, like most males, isn’t the best communicator. Back then it wasn’t as easy to communicate as it is now.  He didn’t have a cell phone.  There was no texting.  I had an email through work but he didn’t email that much.  Don’t even get me started on the old fashioned letters that I hinted for but never got!  We were pretty much left with the telephone that he shared with four other guys in the house in which he lived.  But we knew we were meant to be together and God watched over our relationship.

The Greers, Established 2002

In August of 2002 we got married and settled in Nashville, Tennessee.  I didn’t think I could be any happier.  We had our whole life ahead of us.  We both had a good start to our careers.  We were happy and madly in love. We spent every weekend trying to make our house a home.  And if we weren’t at a football game, we were at a wedding.  We were at the age that all of our friends were getting married.  And since we lived in the heart of the Southeastern Conference, one didn’t get married on a game weekend!  We went on dates and fun trips when we could afford it.  It truly was the honeymoon period.

My maternal side emerged after only a few months and I begged to get a puppy.  After little persuasion, I convinced Eric to let us get Majors (named after famed UT football coach, Johnny Majors).  He was my baby. 

As I mentioned before, I am a planner. When I first started with GE, I went into a Franklin Covey store and spent my paycheck on a beautiful planner.  A planner that could not only help me plan my day in A, B, and C order, but I could plan six months ahead - even two years ahead!  It served me well in my career.  I planned meetings.  I planned contests for my sales team.  I planned trainings.  I made plans about plans.  I always had a plan and that kept me sane in a stressful, high demand workplace.

I also had a plan for the Greers.  Get married.  Enjoy being newlyweds for two years.  Have our first child.  Wait another couple of years and have our second.  If we have two kids that are the same gender, then try for a third in another two years.  It would be that simple, right?  For some, maybe so.

It took a little more convincing than I anticipated to get Eric on my plan’s timeline.  But after much campaigning, I got him on my timetable.  I couldn’t help it.  I was so ready to become a mother.  All my life I have loved kids.  I made all my money in high school babysitting the kids in my neighborhood.  I never had a lot of clarity on what my career would be but I always knew I would be a mother.  And I was ready now.

One of my good friends, Kristin, was a great resource to me.  She had already had her first child.  She was a nurse and she loved to help people. I wanted to know everything I needed to know about how to get pregnant and she was ready and willing to help.

I learned about tracking my temperatures to figure out when I was ovulating.  I learned what ovulation is and why it is so important.  She told me when we should and shouldn’t try.  She even shared with me some old wives’ tales like how long I need to stay lying down so the sperm could do their job. We were going to hit the ground running.  I was so excited.  I just knew that we were going to start trying and instantly get pregnant. 

It was exciting at first. When I told Eric we had to have sex every other day, he wondered why we hadn’t started trying sooner!  I lingered in the baby aisle at Target.   Need this. Need this. Must have this!!  Oh I can’t wait to register! I passed through the maternity section and imagined my growing belly in the different outfits.  I calculated due dates.  I imagined clever ways to announce my pregnancy.  I even picked up the book, “What to Expect When You are Expecting.”  Can’t be too prepared!

Our first attempt to conceive coincided with a trip to New York City for Thanksgiving.  I didn’t even have a glass of wine because I was SURE that I was pregnant.  Granted, the sperm hadn’t even had a chance to fertilize the egg, but I just KNEW I was pregnant and wasn’t going to take a chance.

Diagnosis:  Infertile

That is the way it was for a couple of months.  Then my obsessive nature took over.  I started not only checking my basal body temperatures each morning but I put the results in an Excel spreadsheet and even made a graph!  As silly as it was it gave me the first indication that I was INFERTILE.  As I looked at my temperatures it became clear that I wasn’t ovulating until very late.  I didn’t ovulate until day 28 and my cycle was only 34 days long.

Being a take charge kind of gal, I made an appointment with my OBGYN.  I went in armed with my graphs so we could figure out what to do. I went through a battery of blood tests to figure out what was going on with me. I will always be grateful to my doctor for listening to me.  Traditionally you have to try unsuccessfully to conceive for 12 months (a full year!) before you are given a workup and treatment for infertility.  We had only been trying to get pregnant for a few months. But it was quite clear that my body wasn’t doing what it needed to do for us to get pregnant. 

I was so frustrated.  Something was wrong with me.  Why can’t my body do what it is supposed to do?  I mean, I am a woman, right?  Had I done something to cause this? Was I just getting what I deserved?  I did have a little wild phase in college.  Why couldn’t I just be normal?  Everyone was getting pregnant around me!  No problem at all.  They just went off the pill and poof!  They were pregnant.  And then there were those who weren’t even trying that were getting pregnant too!  I felt like a failure.  And it didn’t seem to bother Eric that much and that made me mad.  He didn’t understand why I was so upset.

The blood tests confirmed everything that my temperatures indicated.  I needed help to get me to ovulate on time.  According to my doctor, I needed to take Clomid to help me ovulate more regularly.  I also needed to take progesterone after I ovulated.  I had what is called a Luteal Phase Defect which means that the time between ovulation and the start of my next cycle isn’t long enough. My uterine lining would shed before an embryo even had enough time to implant.  The progesterone would prolong the luteal phase (keeping my uterine lining intact) so that if I got pregnant the embryo would have enough time to implant.

It felt good to have a plan. My OBGYN said she would let me cycle like this for a few months but after that she would refer me to a reproductive endocrinologist (RE) for further evaluation.  That was fine by me because I was going to get pregnant the first month.  If not the first, then certainly the second!  She also wanted Eric to go to an urologist to be evaluated as well.  This proved to be a vital step in our diagnosis.

So that brings us back to me sitting in my office chair after getting another pregnancy announcement email.  Bawling my eyes out and hugging Majors, my fur baby, for dear life.  I went from a life that was living wedding shower to wedding  ceremony of all my friends to a life of weekly pregnancy announcements and baby showers.  That is where we were in life.  A time when even a simple question like “Guess what?” got an excited “You’re pregnant!!!!” in return.  No…I just found a good pair of jeans.  While all of my other friends in their mid to late 20s were deciding to just “go off birth control and see what happens”, I was taking drugs just to give me a prayer of conceiving. 

Little did I know that this would be a nearly ten year journey for us.  It would be a journey that would bring me a lot of tears but even more strength.  A journey that against all odds brought me closer to my husband and taught me that I had to trust and lean on God.  Through much of the journey I felt like I was all alone.  Unless you have been through infertility you just cannot understand how isolated it makes you feel.  I have many reasons for writing this book.  The first and foremost one is this:  YOU ARE NOT ALONE.  Please join me on my journey.  If you are infertile I think you will be able to identify with some of it.  Hopefully that will help you to know that you aren’t the only one who feels this way.  If you happen to have a loved one who is struggling to conceive, perhaps this will give you a small glimpse into the trials and agony of infertility.