Since it is now February, and most of Chicagoland is covered in an ungodly amount of snow and all of the parties have finally ended, I have found a few moments to catch up.  In doing so, I started blogging a little more, and when I did, I took some time to go back and look at my first posts from 4.5 years ago.  Wow, life sure was different back then: young married couple in our twenties, living in San Francisco, baking bread for a living, just home from 6 months in Argentina....  I think you have a pretty good idea of how things have changed.  I mean, heck, my passport expired 2 years ago, and I failed to even notice.  All of this is not to say that life is bad, in fact, it is incredible, but we have moved on to a VERY different stage of life.  Ben and I have been together for 10 years now, married  for 8.  We are in our mid-thirties, we have 2 cats, 2 cars, a nutball of a daughter and a big house in the suburbs.  Life is boring and exciting all at once.

But, 4.5 years ago when I started writing, I wanted the same thing I want now: to be healthy enough to manage my PCOS and have a baby.  Somewhere along the way, I lost track of that on this site.  Sure, I was practicing a lot of it in real life, but I never took the time to write it down.  With less than a month to go before we can officially begin to try again, my health has never been so important.

PCOS (only one of the fertility issues we are facing) affects the body in many ways.  One very important way is that it messes with your ability to regulate insulin.  And when the insulin goes unregulated, weight gain goes up, hormones get out of whack, and ovulating simply doesn't happen.  One of the positives of a PCOS diagnosis is that there is a great deal of nutritional and holistic therapy that can be monumental in improving one's chance of conceiving.  It allows the person with the diagnosis to feel like they can control at least one piece in a puzzle that is otherwise completely out of their hands.  I imagine that "undiagnosed infertility" is exponentially more frustrating because if you can't identify the problem, where do you even begin treatment?

In May of 2013, a few weeks after my miscarriage, I went full speed into the world of holistic infertility treatments.  I booked a fertility massage, designed to cleanse the body of toxins following a miscarriage.  I started seeing an acupuncturist, and I began working with a nutritionist.  I was gung-ho....until I learned about my retained placenta.  With comfort nowhere to be found, I turned to eating and drinking again.  Why bother with the damned fertility diet if trying again wasn't even on the table?  So, I continued with the treatments all summer to try and removed the retained placenta.  Every thing they tried gave me hope.  So with each new procedure, I started my diet anew.  And with every failure, I returned to my old dietary habits.  I yo-yo'ed through 1 D&amp;C, 2 rounds of methotrexate,