Yesterday's appointment

Our appointment yesterday was a good one. We expected to just do injects training and sign consent forms. But they also asked us if we had considered how many embryos we wanted to transfer. I said that we were thinking two, but hadn't decided firmly quite yet. The doctor went into a long talk about the risk of twins vs a singleton and while I already knew the statistics he mentioned, I think it was alarming for my husband to hear. The RE said that having twins is not considered a normal pregnancy and can have many complications. Many people wish for twins without being aware of these serious risks. We listened to his information, of course, and continued to give it much thought throughout the day. After work, my husband and I discussed it at length and came back to the conclusion that we still felt like two was the right number to transfer. We aren't wishing for twins, but this gives us a better chance of a pregnancy at all. We will be happy with whatever God blesses us with.

The RE said again how optimistic he is that I will become pregnant from our transfer. He said that we already have many factors going for us: 1) These embryos were created from an egg donor. That puts the odds in our favor big time and 2) They have proven success. There have been three children already born from this batch. He said "it would be irresponsible for me to say 'YOU WILL BECOME PREGNANT' but I am very optimistic that you will." This was very reassuring!

He also talked about how it's important for us not to tell people that we are going through treatments, especially because we are using donor embryos. His rationale for the first part, which I understand, is that once people know, they will tell everyone else and that information could inadvertently come back to your  unknowing child one day and hurt him/her. He also said that if the treatment doesn't work, it will be a knife in the heart to have to explain to everyone what happened. But for us, we have already told family members and friends who are close to us. And we have been lucky because hardly anyone has been judgmental or anything but supportive about any of it. Everyone has been caring and rightfully curious and we have been happy to answer questions and educate. But all in all, I really have appreciated the support of those that we have told and I don't regret sharing it for one second. As far the concern about the information getting back to our child that he/she was a product of embryo adoption and it ruining their life, that part might have made sense if we hadn't already planned to tell our child from the get go. This was something my husband and I decided long ago, we don't ever want it ever to be a secret to them. We saw a psychologist in the summer of 2012 who specialized in children born of donor gametes. She said it's incredibly important not to spring this information on our child because the shock element can be traumatizing. Instead, it should be part of their "normal." Her suggestion was to start compiling a baby book with everything about them from the point that we were searching for embryos to adopt. We would continue to document the transfer, pregnancy, birth, and everything else until around the time they are nine months old. Then we should read the book to them. They likely won't understand it completely, but we should continue to do this every nine months or so as they grow older. This way, they will always know where they came from and it won't be a shocking realization one day. They will also know how much love went into how they came into this world. My husband and I have decided to use the term "baby seed" for explaining it to them without having to go too far into the birds and the bees talk. We will use the example of a garden and how beautiful flowers grow from a variety of seeds. Most of the time, mommies and daddies have baby seeds of their own that they can use to start their family garden, but sometimes they need help from other families. We wanted to grow our family so we were blessed to be able to use the baby seeds from others to grow our family garden, but we love our family just as much as if they were ours to begin with.

Even before the doctor's recommendation about keeping it under wraps, I decided to wait to announce anything formally on facebook until we are actually pregnant. I just know that some people can be very shallow and I would hate for someone to say something stupid about it.

We are venturing into uncharted territory with decisions that have such an impact and I pray we make as few mistakes as possible. So many decisions to make with imperfect information. Welcome to the world of infertility.

Oh and one last thing - someone had asked on an earlier blog post how much it cost for us to ship the embryos from Virginia to Texas. We just got the bill yesterday, and it was only $385.

I'll leave you with a couple of pictures. Here is a picture of my box of meds that is sitting in my kitchen.

And here is a picture of the two syringes and needles I will be using. The one on the left is for Lupron, which I will begin on Sunday and will do every morning. This one goes into my belly and isn't bad at all. The one on the right, however, is for progesterone in oil (PIO). It goes deep into my muscle above my butt. My husband has to administer the second one daily. This cell-phone picture doesn't do it justice, but that sucker is LONG. And it does hurt! I had to inject menopur into the same muscle with a similar needle during the summer and I hated it. Oh well, I'll do whatever it takes for us to have a baby. :)