The Beginning

My husband and I have been married since 2006 and on the journey to parenthood for four years.  We began our journey in 2008 a month after we bought our first home.  Like most couples, we had no idea where the journey would lead us.  In fact, I had a few concerns about the possibility of not getting pregnant, but only because I had known some women who struggled before having their babies, and I was not arrogant enough to think this was going to work on the first try.  Once the first six months of “actively trying” to conceive went by with no positive result, my mild concern turned into worry.  “This might take even longer than I thought.”  Because I am a Type 2 Diabetic, I thought I better make an appointment with my OBGYN.  She referred me to one of the biggest infertility clinics in my state.  I was told 99% of the people she sends to this clinic get pregnant within the first year.  Those are amazing statistics.  I’ve come to hate statistics.  I, of course, fell in with the 1% that did not get pregnant within the first year.  In years to come I would find myself on the wrong side of the statistics every single time.

“Too Shy Shy, Hush Hush,  IUI”

Most women are told by their doctors to try “naturally” for a year before seeking medical assistance but because I was T2D I was lucky enough to get started after only six months of “Job Sex.”  If you don’t know what Job Sex is, it is the timed, emotionless, passionless, strictly for the purpose of baby-making sex that takes over your life.  It is total bullshit and it sucks.  In fact, many couples statistically don’t make it past the year of Job Sex.  It puts enormous strain on a relationship, absolutely ruins your sex life, and is as far from enjoyable as pulling your finger nails out.  When you “take a break” from job sex you don’t go back to your normal, exciting, passionate sex life you used to have, you just stop having sex.  Good luck getting pregnant that way.  So when I say I was lucky to start medically assisted fertility treatments, I truly mean lucky.  The first treatment was IntraUterine Insemination (IUI) with oral medication (Clomid).  Kate Gosselin got pregnant with her two multiple-birth pregnancies using this treatment.  So therefore, I was certain I would get pregnant.  I was so filled with hope, I knew this would work.  We told no one what we were doing.  We were excited, knowing we would be pregnant soon and be able to make an amazing announcement to our families.  I even bought a Halloween costume to wear while pregnant.  It was a foam oven that you’d wear like a tunic with the caption, “Bun in the Oven”.  I was sure this would work.  When our first IUI failed I literally collapsed at work.  My girlfriends who knew the general idea of what we were doing came to my rescue.  I even made a new friend that day.  A woman I was not very close with at all at that point in my life came into the office where I was on the floor sobbing, who had gone through a long bout with infertility herself, came in the room and said “GET UP!”  Two other friends were there too, trying to support me, rubbing my back, letting me cry, but not really knowing what to do, when CL barged into that room and yelled at me to get up off that floor.  I didn’t realize then how many times I would hear her voice in my head as I lay destroyed from yet another failure.  “GET UP!”  We would have three more failed IUIs after that.  Each failure worse than the last.

During this time I decided to go back to church.  Well, go to a church, I was brought up Catholic but never felt I belonged there.  In December, after 3 failed IUIs, I thought to myself, this may be more than just a physical issue, maybe there is something spiritual going on here too.  I walked alone into the First Presbyterian church in my town on December 9th.  It was the day of their Christmas Pageant where all the kids in the church were putting on the Nativity play and dressed up like shepherds and kings and barn animals.  Here I am, the new girl, sitting in the last pew, crying like an idiot as I watched these beautiful children.  It was a sign.  I need to be here.  Its going to be a long journey and I’m going to need this support.  My new church family would help me through the end of the year and yet another failed IUI, four in total.  Now it was time to move on, IVF was lurking around the corner.  Strap in.

The Ugly Monster, IVF

Everyone on the journey comes to this point in different ways and at different times.  Some stay as far from IVF as possible, I don’t blame them.  Everyone’s journey is just different.  I was at a place where I had renewed hope and strength with the increased success rates IVF provided.  I was terrified at the same time.  I told no one about how I felt, not even my husband.  I was more afraid of him hesitating from moving forward with the cycle if I expressed to him my fears.  I kept that to myself.  I did however feel at this point we should probably tell my family about whats going on.  I invited them over for dinner to celebrate my dogs first birthday.  I couldn’t think of a better ploy to get them all in one place at one time and since I’ve done crazier things than throw a birthday party for my dog, they thought nothing of it.  After we ate and everyone was sitting at the table I told them I had something to tell them all.  Of course my aunt yells out, “you’re pregnant”!!  “Uuhh, no, but its related to the fact that I’m not pregnant.”  I told them we had been trying at that point for a year and a half.  We spent the last part of 2009 doing IUIs.  One procedure a month from September through December.  Now its 2010 and we are moving on to IVF.  Its terrifying, I’m really nervous, I have to take a lot of injectable drugs, go to a lot of appointments, get put under anesthesia, and have a very invasive transfer procedure.  But our chances of getting pregnant this way are greatly increased and I’m excited because I know this is going to work.

Our first IVF was done in February of 2010, pregnancy test day on March 9th.  I was lucky not to have too many side effects from the injectable drugs.  The intramuscular progesterone shots in the backside were the worst part, but even they didn’t seem so bad after sitting on an ice pack for a few minutes before Hubby darted me in the ass cheek with the 2 inch 25 gauge needle.  In a very weird way, it became our little together time, every night at 8:00pm.  The absolute worst part of the cycle; other than getting up at 4:30am to get to the clinic early enough to beat the crowd of couples that would be waiting outside the door by 6am, was the dreaded two week wait.  This is the time when there are no Dr.’s appointments, no new information coming in, nothing on a day to day basis carrying you into the next day with any glimmer of hope.  You literally sit and wait.  It is the longest two weeks in your life.  This is where you strap your seat belt on and prepare for the roller coaster ride.  This is where you learn what horrible things your mind is capable of doing.  Every tiny ache you convince yourself you’re pregnant.  When the ache goes away, you’re terrified your little embryos have died.  You go between celebrating new life and mourning the death of your child as every minute goes by.  There is no taking your mind off of it.  Its torture.  But I went through this time happily for my baby.  I bonded with it, looked at the little pictures of the two, poor quality embryos they put back inside me.  Hung their pictures on the fridge, like a proud momma.  They were mine, and I loved them already.  The fact that I could have such deep and profound emotions for these microscopic little organisms was amazing to me.  I had no idea I was capable of expressing that kind of love, that I even had it in me.  This was my first glimpse of motherhood, and I craved it.  I had always known I was meant to be a mother, but this overwhelming feeling, inexplicable, other worldly, of GOD, confirmed for me 1000 times over what I already knew.  I am a mother.

March 9th was a beautiful day.  Warm and sunny with clear blue skies.  It was also my late aunts birthday, she would have been 50, how could I get bad news on a day like this?  I went to work that day, expecting to receive good news, expecting to be able to tell the few girlfriends I had at work who were also waiting with baited breath.  The call never came.  It was almost 4pm and I had gone in to give blood for the pregnancy test at 7:00 that morning.  All day I waited to hear.  I decided to call them and see what was taking so long.  I went into an empty office across from my cubicle and closed the door.  They apologized as they had called and left the results on my answering machine at home.  Had they known to call my cell phone I would have known much earlier in the day.  I felt like she wouldn’t stop talking, just tell me the results.  “Your test is negative.”  I just went back to my desk and cried.  Don’t worry, I told myself, it never happens on the first try, we’ll try again.  We did try again, in August and after changing clinics, again in December of that year.  2010 was the year of IVFs.  All failed.  We weren’t quite finished yet.  I don’t know where it comes from but I had energy to move on.  I tell people its that tiger mom spirit.  If your meant to be a mother you have it whether or not you have children.  I’m a mother whose children haven’t come yet.  I’ll do whatever I have to do to fight for them to get here.  It doesn’t matter how they come.  IVF can be an ugly monster.  Its terrifying.  Well, it was terrifying, now that I’m on the other side of it, I find it less scary.  I beat the shit out of IVF and now its time to move on.

My Eggs Are Cracked

At the end of 2010 we were two years and 4 months into our journey to parenthood.  At that point we had done 4 IUIs, 3 IVFs, changed clinics, and had a hysteroscopy.  From this the Dr.’s concluded that I had premature ovarian dysfunction.  Dysfunction, not failure.  I made eggs, I just didn’t make very many and the ones I did make were poor quality.  Luckily, my husband had above average sperm analysis every time.  That is truly lucky because male infertility is so much harder to treat.  There is not much you can do if there aren’t any sperm.  So if my eggs were cracked, maybe we could find someone whose eggs were healthy, and even if I wasn’t genetically related to my child, I could still get pregnant, give birth, and experience that amazing part of motherhood.  Without much thought we moved onto donor egg IVF.  This was going to be expensive.  Compensation for the donors time and effort, (remember she has to do the hard part, the shots, the appointments, the poking and prodding, and the surgery to retrieve the eggs) is $10,000.  In addition to some other costs not being covered by our insurance, like her medications, and cryofreezing the embryos.  This would cost us a whopping total of $16,500.  In January of 2011, we did not have this kind of money.  In fact, we knew we would have to take the better portion of the year to save this kind of money.  That’s when something amazing happened.

Once I started becoming a little more open about our journey and letting more friends and family into our experience, people came out of the woodwork to help.  My girlfriend CL who was such a huge support to me through our journey, (who was the one that told me to GET UP off that floor when my journey started) offered to host a flea market for us to help us raise money.  Once we got the word out, people from all over, some I knew and many I didn’t, donated items to be sold at the flea market.  My husband and I were only in our house for a few years, we didn’t have much to sell, but we collected items from all over the place.  Friends, friends of friends, friends of family, family of friends, complete strangers, all came to donate items for us to sell.  We ended up having two flea markets and raised over $1000.00 towards our baby fund.  In the mean time, we tightened our purse strings at home, and saved as much as we could.  While we were saving we also started going to regular acupuncture appointments.  I began biweekly therapy sessions to wrap my head around having a child genetically unrelated to me and my family.  By the end of the summer we were sorting through the paperwork, insurance, and donor profiles.

Trying to find someone, sight unseen, that reminds you most of you, is an interesting experience.  We looked at about five different profiles and finally chose a donor we really liked.  She had donated twice before and each of those recipients got pregnant, she was of German decent like my mother, and even tho she was a little shorter than me, she reminded me of myself and of my mother.  She danced as a young girl just like I did, was very smart, owned her own business, and impressed me with her determination and go-getter attitude.  She really reminded me of me and I was so grateful for her.  We were ready to get started when we were hit with an enormous blow.

In November of 2011, right when we were ready to begin the cycle, I was laid off from my job of 12 years.  You have got to be kidding me.  Dear Lord, what the hell does this mean?  My first question was, “will I lose my insurance?”  Luckily again, I was given a nice severance package with full benefits and my full salary for 24 weeks.  That would take me into June of 2012 and we were planning our donor egg IVF cycle after the holidays in January.  This must mean something.  Why would I lose my security, my job that I loved, at this pivitol time in my life?  Everyone told me it was better this way.  I could stay home, collect my severance, relax, focus on what we were about to do, and be in a better state of mind and health to get pregnant.

Our donor gave us 17 eggs, 3 were immature and didn’t fertilize, 5 were multinucleated meaning two sperm tried to fertilize one egg, (these embryos won’t survive), and 9 were fertilized normally.  Of these 9 embryos, 3 made it to the blastocyst stage on day 5, 2 were transferred into me, and 1 was cryofrozen.  We couldn’t have prayed for better results.  I produced an average of 4 eggs with nearly overdosing on ovarian stimulating medications.  Seventeen eggs were more than we could have hoped for, everything was looking good.  My uterus was looking good, my hormone levels were right where they were supposed to be, everything was positive and moving along perfectly.  The dreaded two week wait was torturous as expected, the pregnancy test day was equally devastating.  We waited all day, my husband finally called at about 3:30pm, he just looked at me and shook his head.  It was over.  And with that, as you might expect, my world crumbled around me.

In My Greatest Darkness, There Is a Small Glimmer of Light

This light in my darkness came in the form of a small framed, fiery, Puerto Rican woman with a heart twice her own size and a soul wrapped in blankets of gold.  If ever there was an angel on Earth for me, she is it.  A week after our donor egg IVF failed and my face was literally scraped up with salt trails from my endless tears, DR called me over to help her make empanadas.  She had been an amazing support to me for years as we journeyed to parenthood.  I cleaned myself up, and was happy to be with her, have lunch with her, and just look at her sweet face.  She was more than a cousin-in-law to me, she was a sister.  I felt such gratitude for having her in my life.  What I felt for her after that day was immeasurable.  Gratitude and thankfulness are merely words and do little to describe what I felt when I left her home that day.

While we sat there at her dining room table, enveloping the seasoned beef into the dough, gently sealing it with a fork, DR stops and looks at me, “What would you say if I wanted to hold the baby for you?”  Honestly the way she worded it I didn’t really know what she meant.  I had told her about our cryofrozen left-over embryo but for some reason didn’t put two and two together.  “I want to carry the embryo for you.”  Is she crazy?  That is so sweet but she has no idea what she’s offering and I’m pretty sure surrogacy is illegal in our state.  What an amazing thing to offer, and her heart is made of pure gold for even considering it, but I just don’t think its possible.  But no question is unworthy of an answer so when I went back to the clinic for my follow up visit, I asked the doctor.

After the doctor told me there was no medical reason why I didn’t get pregnant with the A grade embryos I had, she started talking about what minor changes they would make in the next cycle.  Is she on drugs?  There absolutely isn’t going to be another cycle, I’m hesitant to use the embryo I have left.  I took this as my opportunity to tell her what DR had offered.  The glimmer of light becomes a beacon.  It is not illegal.  By definition, since DR is not genetically related to the embryo, a cycle like this is called a gestational carrier, and with some legal action is very much legal in our state.  My jaw dropped.  I couldn’t believe this was actually doable.  I called DR right after my meeting with the doctor.  “Remember that thing you offered the other day?”  She kind of chuckled and said yes.  “Exactly how serious were you about that because it turns out, its not so illegal after all, we could actually do this.”  I couldn’t imagine a person could be more excited about me becoming a mother than she was in that moment.  She acted as though I told her she won the lottery.  There was a lot of work ahead of us, but we had a plan, talk to the husbands, (who by the way are first cousins and as close as brothers) and see where it goes from there.  Lets do it!  Lets get you pregnant with my baby.

Plan B:  Definitely Adopt

I’m not stupid.  I’ve been around the block a couple of times with this infertility thing and I am well aware that when people proverbially say “babies are miracles”, that is not just a cliche, that is absolutely and legitimately true.  In a normal month, the average woman has a 20% chance of getting pregnant.  Because sperm live up to 72 hours and an egg can only live up to 24 hours, there is a very small window of opportunity every month when a woman is capable of getting pregnant.  Not exactly what you were taught in high school huh?  The truth is, its nearly impossible to get pregnant, yet it happens so often, and for so many.  The rise in infertility in recent years is partly due to the fact that women are waiting so long to begin their family.  We want to meet the right guy, have a long well planned engagement, a big spectacular wedding and honeymoon, buy the perfect home, have a well established career and by the time our thirties roll around, we are ready.  Except once you reach the age of 35 your fertility decreases by 50%.  That is huge.  You go from a healthy 20% chance per month to 10%.  The odds are always against you.  In fact, chemical pregnancies and early miscarriages happen sometimes so often and so early in pregnancy, the woman doesn’t realize she was ever pregnant.  Skipped or late periods can sometimes mean something much more significant.  I am well aware that no matter how healthy, or how many healthy pregnancies DR has already had, there is a chance, a very strong chance, she won’t get pregnant with this embryo.  Despite the embryo having a much better chance of living with DR than it does with me, I’m not going to put all my proverbial eggs in one basket.  We are definitely going to adopt.

Adoption is a whole new ballgame with a new set of rules and subsequent disappointments.  If the journey to parenthood was a sport, fertility treatments are like baseball with balls and strikes, single hits, and home runs.  Adoption is more like football.  Waiting for someone to throw you a long pass, hoping you catch it, and once you do catch it, battling your way to the end zone where you’re safe with your little bundle.  All along, lawyers and social workers and birth mothers laying out an obstacle course before you for you to get over, under, or through.  And no one pays you to play.  In fact, you have to cough up $30,000.00 just to get in the game.  Seems impossible.  But there is something very different about adoption, something amazing and comforting.  If you stick with it long enough, you will get your baby.  Its a virtual guarantee.  We went to our first information session on March 14, 2012 at a christian adoption agency in our state, one of the biggest adoption agencies in the world.  The cost to adopt domestically is obscene and to adopt internationally is surprisingly worse.  I still don’t even have a job, how the hell are we going to do this?   Don’t misunderstand.  I am not poor by any means, we do pretty well financially, but we are still below average at best in the financial bracket, and have to strictly budget to make the bills every month and still live fairly comfortably.  We are no different than most people.  I know people who would guffaw at 30 grand but that is an enormous amount of money.  Remember I said it took us a full year to save 16 grand for our donor egg IVF, and that was with a full time job.  I am on unemployment and although I am collecting a severance, that is going to run out very soon, and at the moment, I hadn’t been on an interview let alone have any prospective jobs lined up.  But like a candle flickering in the wind, a great fire was getting ready to rage full of glorious, mounting, HOPE.

When One Door Closes, Kick A Window Open

I was lucky again enough to have my resume in really good shape by the time our donor egg IVF failed.  Until then, I hadn’t done much to get a new job.  Remember, I was convinced God had taken my job from me so I could relax and focus on my upcoming pregnancy.  When I realized I had neither a pregnancy nor a job, I got really pissed off.  Having been laid off had made perfect sense to me as long as I could be pregnant but without that, my joblessness became this insurmountable struggle I could not defeat.  I got pissed off one morning and gathered up enough energy to go on the computer about four days after our negative result and start applying to some jobs.  The door had closed on my fertility, I had to find a way to get passed that, but if there was a window of opportunity to get a new job, to find some new worth, I was going to kick the damn window open.

I found a few interesting available positions.  I was willing to do contract work (short term) with no benefits because Hubby’s benefits were so good and I was covered under him.  I was hoping a contract position might pay me a little more too.  I worked that day for a few hours and then gave up.  I wasn’t expecting anything to come from my efforts.  In the days following, the phone began ringing, and never stopped.  Contract agencies flooded my phone and email offering me potential opportunities.  I didn’t have to do much more than just answer the phone, read some job descriptions, and let them know if I was interested.  It dawned on me.  I’m actually pretty smart.  I interview really well.  The job I do is quite specified and there are lots of opportunities in my field.  I could do this.  I could get a job, a great job, continue to collect the rest of my severance, make more money, save more money.  It was becoming very clear to me.  Had I not lost my job, I would not be entitled to severance, or be given the opportunity to get a new job, a better job, a higher paying job, and I would not be able to save the money we needed to adopt.  What initially looked like an impossible feat, to save 30 grand any time soon, was beginning to become more achievable in the foreseeable future.  I get it now.  This is what we were meant to do.  We may have a baby through DR or we may adopt a baby, but I could see now what was hidden around the corner from me.  The light at the end of the tunnel.  I interviewed for a position I was really excited about, doing very much what I had done at my previous job, more money, long term contract to hire, they offered me the job before the day was out.  I start this Monday, April 9th, 2012.  We’re back in business!