IUD and My pre-pregnancy journey

Today I want to share a bit of my experience going through the decision of having a child and the impacts that birth control had on it. 

Before I dive in I need to let you know that I am not a doctor and this article is meant to share my personal experience and opinion and not to tell you if you should use or avoid birth control methods. That said, if you have questions on how birth control can influence your health, please have a chat with your doctor :) 

The IUD and me

I never did very well on the pill, and I am sure most of you will share this feeling with me. Some pills would make me nauseous, give me headaches, cause weight gain and make me feel more lethargic. It was also hard for me as a teenager and young adult to remember to take it everyday, and for someone who came from a Latin-American country where abortion is still a crime, having an unplanned pregnancy was not an option. After trying it out with many different pills I settled with the patch for many years. If you are wondering what the patch is and how it works, let me give you a bit of context. 

Like most birth control pills, the patch contains the hormones estrogen and progestin. These are similar to the hormones our bodies make naturally. You wear the patch on your belly, upper arm, butt, or back, and your skin absorbs the hormones into your body.

The hormones in the patch stop ovulation. No ovulation means there’s no egg hanging around for sperm to fertilize, so pregnancy can’t happen.

The patch’s hormones also thicken the mucus on your cervix. This thicker cervical mucus blocks sperm so it can’t swim to an egg. It works similarly to the pill, you would wear the patch for 3 weeks and have a week break during which you should get your period.  

After using the patch for many years I started to notice some irregularities with my cycle. That would be months that my period would come early, and some months it would be super late. There were cases that it would not come at all. I checked with my doctor and she said it could be because I was on the same birth control for a long time and recommended that I switch. I did not want to go back to the pill or take shots, so I decided to go with the IUD. 

As you may know from your own experience or from women close to you, the first few weeks after the IUD insertion can be pretty painful, as your body is trying to adapt to this foreign object living inside of you. With time, however, the pain ceases and you start to get more regular periods. Depending on the type of IUD you are using your period can completely stop after having the IUD for a while. That is what happened to me. 

Getting back my period after IUD

I opted for the Jaydess IUD as it had the least amount of hormones and only lasted for 3 years - at the time that was how much I wanted to wait before trying to get pregnant. The manufacturer says fertility should return shortly after the IUD is removed, and even the staff at the clinic advised that I could get pregnant anytime after it was removed. But that did not happen. 

After 3 years I needed to decide if I want to have another IUD inserted or not. I decided not to so we could try for a child. I was just over 30 years old at the time, we both had good stable jobs, so I felt like a good time to get pregnant. I went to the clinic and asked to have the IUD removed and waited for my period to come back. After a few months and not sign of my period I started looking for help to understand what was going on with my cycles. 

Although doctors say that you should be fertile right after removing the IUD, they won’t treat or even investigate the cycle irregularities until 12 months after you had the device removed. Yes, that is correct. They know your cycle won’t go back to normal right away from the beginning, but they tell you it will regardless. Because MDs would not investigate the issue I decided to get help from a Naturopath specialized in fertility. That is when things started to move for me :) 

She taught me how to identify if I was ovulating and when I was on my fertile window. She also prescribed me a diet to help me detox my body from the remaining hormones - basically a liver detox-  and I began to take prenatal supplements. 

For the next nine months I could not identify any signs that I was ovulating. I was also not very interested in having sex at all. One of the effects of all this hormonal disruption can be loss of libido - not a good thing when you are trying to get pregnant. But finally after a lot of trying, no periods and still following a health diet and lifestyle I got pregnant. Yeah! 

My pregnancy came as a surprise as I did not have my period for the last 9 months and I was also sure that I was not ovulating. Although I was happy and excited when I found out, the whole situation made me a bit worried. So I waited until my first ultrasound to officially celebrate. Sam was just a little 6 week-old blurb pulsing with his strong heart beat when I had my first ultrasound in early December last year and I could not even cry on spot as I was so happy and excited (I did cry later when I called my husband to let him know everything was okay). 

Last thoughts

Having the IUD was an overall good experience for me. I did not need to worry about contraception and I felt secure that I would not get pregnant. After the first few months my body was adapted to its presence and I did not feel it anymore. I did not have menstrual cramps and my periods were light - they eventually stopped. The amount of hormones released on my body became an issue only after I had the IUD removed and decided to get pregnant. 

I wasn’t in a hurry to conceive so the wait was not too hard on us, but I can imagine how it is for someone who is really wanting to have a child sooner than later. It is very unfair how deceiving the information passed to us is. We are made to believe that our return to fertility is rapid after the device is removed, but for most of us it is not true, which leads to a lot of unnecessary anxiety. If only health care providers could be honest with us from the beginning we would be more empowered to decide what we want to put in our bodies and if we decide to have it inserted, we would know what to expect after the IUD is removed. Only this could alleviate so much the pressure on women so we won’t think there is something wrong with us, that we are somehow broken. It would ease the pressure in our relationships with our partners, as we all would know that getting back our fertility is a healing process and it can take a long time, and that this time is different for each one of us. 

I still believe most of us are able to conceive after the IUD and I still trust it as a contraceptive method, but I would not recommend it for someone wanting to have a baby in the near future as the healing journey can be long and exhausting. 

I hope me sharing this experience can help you in your decision making. And if you are trying to have a baby and are having a hard time, know that you are not alone and I trust everything will work out for you just like it worked out for us, just allow yourself time to heal :)