Christine McDonough

I started Infertility Illustrated when I realized I was in the same place I’d been two years previously…having just relocated to a new city and simultaneously experiencing a miscarriage.  I decided to draw a little sketch about the irony of it all and the rest is history.

Infertility Illustrated is designed to depict the little moments everyone struggling with infertility experiences - from the humorous to the sad and everything in between.

I am currently based in Washington, DC.

My Fertility Story:

I spent about five years trying to get pregnant. In the beginning, the doctors made it seem so easy - a textbook case of PCOS. They started me on letrozole and I got pregnant on my third cycle. Unfortunately, it was ectopic and my tube ruptured requiring an emergency surgery to remove my right tube. The next cycle was also an ectopic.

After experiencing those first two miscarriages, we took some time. Breaks are essential to maintaining one’s sanity. I tried not to think about getting pregnant, focused on working out and acupuncture. But after several months, it was time to try again. We did two rounds of IUI treatments with no success before turning to IVF.

I started IVF on the day my husband started a five month deployment on an aircraft carrier - terrible timing, but when you’ve been trying to get pregnant for so long, there really is no such thing as “the perfect time.” After my egg retrieval, I developed ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) where I was constantly nauseous, swollen, and sick.

Finally, a month after my egg retrieval, we did our first embryo transfer - and nothing happened. When my husband returned from deployment we did our second frozen embryo transfer the day before we moved from Virginia Beach. That cycle worked - we got pregnant, but unfortunately I had a miscarriage within one week of arriving in our new home city of Chicago. It was a breaking point for both of us. We took a year off to recover - I tried not to think about getting pregnant, we traveled, I focused on resetting my health.

In September 2018, we tried again with another frozen embryo transfer. One of the two embryos we transferred made it and that became our little champion, born May 2019.

We’ve been enjoying time as a family of three, but I know our fertility struggles aren’t over. If and when we decide to have another, it will be back to IVF once again.