Additional Information

"We are Blake and Meagan Pearson. Blake is a firefighter/paramedic and I’m a medical social worker.  We have been married for 7 years this coming October.  We have a spoiled rotten fur baby named Julie. When we first got married, I had just graduated with my bachelor’s degree. We wanted to wait until I had a decent job to make sure we were in the best place possible financially before starting a family. Finding a job in my field with just a bachelor’s degree was difficult, so I decided to go back for my Master’s Degree. I graduated with my Master’s in May of 2016 and found a job in November of that year.  In January of 2017 my dad passed away suddenly, that was a wakeup call telling me that tomorrow is never promised and we should follow our dreams of starting a family.  

We began trying to conceive in February of 2017. We tried on our own up until September of that year. I decided to go see my primary care doctor after three months with no cycle and negative pregnancy tests each month. My PCP drew some labs and I was then diagnosed with insulin resistant PCOS. I was put on Metformin daily and told “Oh this will make you Fertile Myrtle”. I then had a cycle for three months straight and knew that I had to do something different because at this point, I was miserable. It was then that I was referred to Dr. Brezina at Fertility Associates of Memphis.

We had our initial consultation with him in December of 2017.  He ordered the initial labs, blood work and semen analysis. Semen analysis was perfect so nothing wrong on that end.  Nothing abnormal looking on my lab work so I was given meds to make my cycle stop.  He ordered an SHG and HSG.  SHG at that time was normal.  My HSG showed that one of my tubes was blocked.  I had a laparoscopy in March of 2018 and was then diagnosed with endometriosis.  He was able to unblock my tube during this procedure, so then we tried timed intercourse for six months hoping that with everything open I would finally be able to become pregnant.  Six months later, still nothing. 

At this point we decided to try a round of IUI in October of 2018, but it was unsuccessful as I did not have any follicles grow big enough to have the insemination while taking the max dose of Letrozole so my cycle was cancelled.  Our doctor didn’t recommend another cycle of IUI at this point and IVF was not an option financially as my insurance does not cover it, so we decided to try timed intercourse again for another six months. 

We had our follow-up appointment in May of 2019. By this time I had lost 20 pounds and my cycles had started coming naturally on their own.  After discussion with our doctor, we decided to try another round of IUI.  We had three failed IUI attempts.  Our doctor didn’t recommend doing more than three IUI’s, once again our only other option was IVF.  This was very hard news to hear as it is so expensive and we knew we’d have to take out a loan if that was something that we decided to pursue. We decided to take a break and discuss what we wanted to do.  After lots of discussion and prayer we decided that we really wanted a baby of our own and we wanted to give IVF a try. 

We had an appointment with our doctor in January of 2021 and signed the consents for IVF.  We started our IVF cycle at the end of May. During my SHG and trial transfer we found out that I had polyps in my uteru. My doctor recommended surgery to take care of those before attempting transfer. I had my retrieval in June. I had 9 eggs retrieved, 6 were mature, and two made it to freeze as grade C embryos. I was quite bummed at our numbers as with my age and seeing so many others with way more eggs and embryos than I had, I just thought I would have more. I had come to terms with it and took it as having two shots at a transfer. 

A couple days later, I received a call from my doctor to discuss my retrieval numbers. It was not what he had expected either so we scheduled an appointment to discuss what we wanted to do.  We are so thankful for such a wonderful doctor that we have had for this journey.  We met with him on the 1st of this month and decided to go ahead and schedule another laparoscopy before my transfer to clean out the polyps and any endometriosis that has come back to give us the best chance possible when we do our transfer.  We then decided that with only two grade C embryos, financially it makes more sense to transfer both so we will do that in a few months.  I am terrified at the thought of neither one taking and being right back where we started with nothing left to show for it but debt, but we are just going to keep praying hard that at least one of them will stick! Good Luck and prayers to all our fellow fertility warriors out there!"