One of the medications that doctors use to help women trying to conceive is progesterone supplements. After insemination, to help prevent miscarriage, my wife had to use progesterone suppositories twice a day. That’s right: suppositories. They were vaginal suppositories. You know what that means, right?
Now, my wife is very dedicated (particularly with getting pregnant!), so she set her cell phone to remind her twice a day (8am and 7pm) to take her medication. In this case, “taking her medication” meant inserting a “pill” about the size of her fingertip up her…well…up there.
So, each time her phone beeped in reminder, I would call out, “Up yourrs!” She got into it. So much so, that it’s what we started calling it. Not “take the progesterone” or “insert the pill”. She would say, “Oh man, I forgot to go up yours!”
The doctors prescribed this for 12 weeks! Twice a day for twelve weeks. That’s 168 times she had to suffer this slight indignity, and she never missed any, not even one. Good job. The doctors said that by the time a pregnancy established itself, after a month or so, the fetus was generating way more progesterone than the supplements were providing (about 90% more), so it almost didn’t matter, but we stuck with it, just to make sure (we didn’t want to have any regrets).
Just a few days ago, we celebrated a milestone in our first pregnancy, a milestone that most pregnant couples don’t get. We celebrated the end of progesterone vaginal suppositories. No more Up Yours!
And everything’s still going strong. We will probably never know for sure, but we feel confident that this helped us have a good start to the pregnancy.
-Asawang Buntis
