Geoff and I moved to Milwaukee immediately following our wedding in 2011, and started house shopping a few months later. As soon as we started house shopping, we decided we were ready to start a family. What that meant to us was to keep living our lives the way we were, but for me to stop taking birth control. We figured it would be a month or two, but it wouldn’t be long before we had a baby on board.

Boy, were we wrong.

We tried for months, ended up finding our house, kept trying, and eventually got the results we were hoping for! Two pink lines! Unfortunately, two days later, we ended up miscarrying. Not only is a miscarriage a hard thing to go through for anyone, we had been trying for almost a year at this point, and it was devastating. We met with our doctor and had a few tests done to make sure we were okay, and we discovered that I am Rh-negative, which means that if my blood and the baby’s blood mix, my body thinks that the baby is a disease and actually attacks it.

Basically, there’s nothing you can do about it except get a big ol’ shot in the butt within a couple days of miscarrying, which prevents “sensitization” for your next pregnancy. Once you become pregnant again, you get the shot again at 28 weeks and after giving birth (if the baby is Rh-positive) to protect you for the next one. And so on and so forth.

So I guess there was a silver lining there. If we hadn’t miscarried, we wouldn’t have found out about my blood type, and this may have happened to us again. We were also able to inform my family members, some of whom are also Rh-negative, so they are aware of it and can take appropriate steps when the time comes.

Bottom line: for those of you out there who are in the same boat as we were, keep trying. It might take a month, it might take a year, but things will work out exactly the way they are supposed to.