Our Life In Pieces – Jennifer West

As many of you already know, we lost a baby last summer. This is something we know happens often, but you never expect it to happen to you…until it does.

I want to share something with you that I so wish I had when we were trying to conceive. I will also share our story and why I think tracking your fertility at home is so important. I feel like having the Mira Fertility Plus Tracker would have taken a lot of my anxiety away while trying to conceive, especially after a miscarriage. The Mira Fertility Plus Tracker is able to detect your estrogen and LH levels, know your cycle phases, hormone patterns, and all fertile and infertile days. It is so much more accurate than those drug store tests. Mira will show your actual number of hormones with 99% accuracy and give you a larger fertile window of 6 days. The Mira Fertility Plus Starter Kit comes with the Mira analyzer and a box of 10 wands. It also comes with a free app that pairs with your analyzer. It is super easy to use and convenient.

Here’s our story and why I think this tracker is so important.

I was about 8 weeks pregnant at a routine scan when they told me my baby had no heartbeat. I was in shock and alone because of the pandemic. Thankfully my husband always comes to my appointments and waits in the car because I definitely could not have driven myself home that day. He was on a work call when I got into the car and immediately got off because he saw the look on my face. We drove home sad and confused. Trying to figure out how we would tell our son who was so excited about the baby. We eventually found a way to cope as a family and I’m so grateful we had each other during this difficult time.

A few weeks later I spoke with my doctor about possible fertility issues. I knew my mom had gone through menopause before age 40 and given that I was almost 36 at the time, we decided it might be a good idea to run some tests. As it turned out I have low AMH and high FSH. This basically means I had less of a chance of getting pregnant and carrying that baby to term than others my age. After everything we had recently been through, we decided it wouldn’t hurt to see a fertility specialist just in case. The fertility specialist told us there was definitely still a chance we could get pregnant on our own, but he would be happy to run more tests if we wanted. Initially we said yes, but later found out just the initial bloodwork would cost 8-10 thousand dollars. Since we already had one perfect son, we knew we were blessed with more than a lot of others and we would just keep trying on our own. If it wasn’t meant to be for our family, we would figure it out from there. By some miracle we got pregnant a few months later.

While I am grateful everyday for this life growing inside of me, this pregnancy has not been easy. At 9 weeks I did genetic testing because of my age. We were told our little girl may have Turner Syndrome. Turner Syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality that typically results in death or serious health complications. We just wanted our baby to survive no matter what, so we decided to do further testing so we knew how to help her the best we could if this was the case. At 12 weeks I had a CVS procedure where they take out a piece of the placenta for further testing. A week later I got a call with the results. Baby girl did NOT have Turner Syndrome. I felt so many emotions this day and was so grateful for this outcome. From here on out it was still a series of ups and downs and all the physical symptoms of pregnancy, plus the anxiety of pregnancy after miscarriage really wore me out. Mentally this felt like the longest 9 months of my life, but as we near the end I am just beyond grateful for this little girl who will soon be in our arms.

Given everything we’ve been through, my age, and known egg quality issues, we’ve decided to not try for anymore children after this one is born. I plan to use the Mira Fertility Tracker to help with that. If you’re trying to conceive or trying not to, use code JEN10 for 10% off the Mira Fertility Plus Starter Kit. I truly hope this will make life a little less stressful for you.