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Know When to See a Fertility Specialist

After 12 months of trying, if you haven’t gotten pregnant, it is time to find a fertility specialist. Women over 35 need to make the call after six months. Jackie and Scott were surprised to find out they needed help starting a family, but thrilled when baby Josh was born after IVF at our Dallas fertility center.

Video transcript

Jackie: I completely understand why we had to go through this process with a fertility specialist. As horrible and as hard as it was, I completely understand why we had to go through it, now.

Scott: I work in sports journalism, which is the most male-dominated thing ever. People were like, “Oh a lot of times you’ll meet people where you work.” And unless I wanted to marry a 55-year-old man, I went with online dating.

Jackie: When we were dating, we knew that we wanted two kids. It was just kind of something that it wasn’t a question. We’re just going to have two kids and that was the way it was going to be! We wanted to be married for a year, and then we’re going to have a kid.

And that didn’t happen.

When life gives you lemons, see a fertility specialist

Scott: You have things you want, and we want to plan things out as much as possible. But as in life, you want this, this and this. But things come up, and it isn’t that easy.

Jackie: [My OB-GYN] said, “You know, I think you might want to look into a fertility specialist.” And I just broke down. I was like, a fertility specialist? Are you kidding me? Like seriously, I can’t get pregnant?

Dr. Dara Havemann: Jackie and Scott came back for a subsequent frozen embryo transfer. That allowed us to give Jackie’s ovaries time to go back to their normal size and for her estrogen levels to normalize, which would give us not only a better success with a frozen embryo transfer and higher pregnancy rates, but also allow her, when she gets pregnant, to not have some the of lingering symptoms from IVF, such as enlarged ovaries and high oxygen levels.

Jackie: I don’t want a NICU baby [neonatal intensive care unit]. I don’t want my baby to come a month early. I don’t want to have to go through what I see all the parents I deal with go through. It’s a hard area. It’s a challenging area. There, I get a lot of joy out of seeing babies go home. But I don’t want my baby in the NICU.

I really think I’m pregnant!

Scott: The day we found out we were pregnant – we were maybe two weeks before they were like, You’ll find out or we’ll let you know on Friday if you’re pregnant. So I’m at work on a Wednesday, and I get a call from my wife. And she goes, “You’re going to need to come home.”

Scott: And I’m like, oh no. I rush home, and she had tried two other pregnancy tests. And she’s like, I really think I’m pregnant! So it was great. Now we still had to wait till that Friday to make sure, because there are ways that there could be false positives or whatever. But it was, it was unexplainable. It was unbelievable!

My baby thinks I’m the coolest thing in the world

Jackie: This is Josh Bell. Joshua. And he is almost 10 months old. He is crawling and pulling himself up. And he loves books and singing and anything with lights and sounds.

Scott: And eating anything put in front of him! And eating things that aren’t put in front of him.

Jackie: Yeah! Everything goes in his mouth. Every time I make him laugh, he just thinks I’m the coolest thing in the world.

Scott: I think we grew a lot through everything because we both didn’t know what was going to happen and how it was going to happen. But we knew we were in it together.