RA and infertility

Before you ask, Yes, I do have a child. It took all of heaven, earth, God, doctors, and modern medical science to achieve BABY. She was worth every single bit of the effort. I wanted to bring this up in my blog because I know that I am by far not the only women to suffer from infertility due to side effects of RA. What I HAVE learned, is that many many many women suffer from this, and they DON'T know that their infertility is linked to it. After we were able to conceive at last, we kept miscarrying. After the second consecutive miscarriage in a short time, my OB decided that it was not a random coincidence and that, more than likely, their was a larger underlying reason for it. He took the time to comb through my medical records and search for more clues. On some random medical info form I mentioned that I had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis as a child. Since I was not currently on any medications for RA (*as the joint pain itself was minimal at the time), this bit o history kept flying under every one's radar. Here is what I learned. Many women have RA and don't know it. They may have minimal joint pain, all of which is manageable by over the counter meds. And our busy every day lives tend to provide reasons for that pain. Now it's wonderful to NOT suffer from painful RA, but here's the sneaky unfortunate part. A large percentage of these same women will continuously miscarry with out ever knowing the reason why. What happens is inflammation from the RA attacks the embryo. My Dr said he has had a lot of patients that miscarried all the time and were never able to have a baby, and then had RA at an early age (in their 40s). By the time the women knew they had RA, they were often just past menopause, and it was most often too late for them to seek treatment to have a baby. It is something my OB Dr has come to look for in all his patients who have more than 2 or 3 unexplained miscarriages, particularly when the miscarriages are grouped together in shorter time frames and/or the women has never carried a full term baby. My OB finds this info in my records, and makes a medical plan for us. He knows we can now get ourselves pregnant (another long story for another day). He now had to come up w a plan for Keeping us pregnant. With my particular case, (in other words, other than miscarrying I was otherwise very healthy at the time, although no spring chicken when it came to having a baby), he advised me to #1. go on prenatal vitamins. #2. the moment I even thought I my eggo was preggo - positive test or not - to start taking one low dose aspirin per day and to call his office at once to set up blood tests and such. #3. Once we had a positive pregnancy blood test, he started me on the progesterone cream daily through the first trimester. #4. He recommended a lot of bed rest. Friends, it was a long, scary, taxing pregnancy that was touch and go until the very day we delivered her 3 weeks early. But by God it was so incredibly worth it that I can not even put it into words how happy I am that we gave it all we had one more time. Everyone finds themselves on their own island of problems/challenges/concerns when they can't get pregnant and deliver that earnestly sought after holy grail of baby joy at the drop of their panties like every crack whore in the world can. (once again, feel free to insert your rant here). I hope that someone reading this who has gone through unexplained infertility might just find the last piece of their puzzle, and find a solution for them-self. For the record, my autoimmune blood work still comes back (to this day) as "extremely low but there." Yet it was enough to prevent us from having a baby. *as mentioned before, my history of RA has thus far included more odd side effects related to RA than joint pain itself. As a result, I have not been on RA medications most of my life. I was treated with aspirin (20 per day for 3 years as a child), and with ibuprofen as an adult.