The Clomid Diaries

My adventure with Clomid began about 8 months after I got married. After 7 months off of birth control and Aunt Flo still nowhere in sight, my doctor decided that if I was ever going to get pregnant, we’d have to call in the big guns. So, prescription in hand, I headed off into the wilderness of fertility drugs.

Clomid is a drug that is used when a woman ovulates irregularly or not at all. According to babycenter.com, side effects include “stomach pain, breast tenderness, insomnia, nausea and vomiting, blurred vision, headaches, fatigue, irritability, depression, weight gain”.

Thankfully, I didn’t experience any of that. What I did experience, however, were insane, wacky, wild dreams. We’re talking crazy weird. I’d wake up laughing, or crying, or utterly confused. I’d dream about people and events that I didn’t even know I remembered.

I’d dream about the boy who sat next to me for one week in second grade and then transferred to another school. I’d dream about a specific trip to the mall with my mother when I was 12. Stories and friends and situations would get all jumbled up into dreams in which I would wrestle to find meaning, or a lesson, or even a point. I rarely did.

In its own way, my time on Clomid was one of the most emotional times of my life. As I waited and waited for my cycle to return (and really, who ever thought I’d be praying to get my period?!?), I realized just how badly I wanted a baby. It hadn’t been long enough for me to be considered truly “infertile”, and yet I felt somehow broken. Over and over, I heard that stress would only make it harder for this foreign substance that was costing me so much sleep to do its job. But how can you not stress, when it feels like all your hopes are riding on a pill?

I know how lucky I am that my story has a happy ending. Eventually, that little “ovulatory stimulant” did in fact stimulate my ovulation, and I got pregnant and gave birth to a perfect baby boy. Eventually, all those crazy dreams gave way to my own personal dream come true. Maybe those dreams were my subconscious way of getting rid of all the unnecessary memories in order to make way for a lifetime of new ones with my son. For that I have Clomid, and many sleepless nights, to thank. I’m eternally grateful.