Sweet and Low

On Monday I go in for a glucose test – this is a test for gestational diabetes that, at least from my doc.’s point of view, is mandatory even if you have no symptoms because there is a 5% chance I could be one of those who has it but doesn’t show it. Being a veteran infertile I know all about being on the low side of the odds so I’ll have to suck it up, or drink it down a 20 oz. bright orange sugar liquid. You have to fast for about 8 hours beforehand drink the stuff and then take a blood test an hour later. I don’t eat sugar (except in fruit and sometimes honey) so I imagine I’ll get pretty wound up and then totally crash and feel like crap. On the up side I spoke with my Chinese doctor who told me what to eat right after the test and the homeopathic pediatrician we found suggested some drops to take as specific intervals post sugar high.
Will report back and let you know.

One more thing: my husband finally told his brother about DE – no we hadn’t told him, hadn’t even told him details about our infertility, we’re very good at keeping secret, but as I’ve written here before we don’t want this to be a secret. He’s still got a few more to tell, but that will come. Of course tomorrow being thanksgiving there are more people we could tell BUT because my parents, while understanding that we want to share this information, are reticent to tell anyone they know there is a bit of a conflict in my own mind: do we tell people because want to tell them tomorrow OR, to spare my parents their conflicting emotions etc., do we just not say anything save it for times when we see individuals alone? i think im leaning toward waiting for the parents not to be around. Anyone have any advice/thoughts on this?

have a nice thanksgiving!

95% of the time it’s nothing…

Just got a pre-cancerous melanoma removed on Saturday. The dermatologist had said “when you’re pregnant things grow so be sure to check in with me” and voila…she found something. Well, that’s why I go. This is the third one that’s gotten cut out of me. I take cancer or it’s possibility very seriously. Coming up on Thursday is the three year anniversary of the general check up appointment when the doctor, agreeing with my Chinese doc and acupuncturist, felt things weren’t quite right around my neck and that I should get a scan. 95% of the time it’s nothing…and silly me, I believed her. Of course it wasn’t fine. And I had to have a 6 hour surgery to remove two tumors and my entire thyroid which meant that the treatment after surgery was more aggressive. Basically I drank radiation. When you don’t have a thyroid you don’t have a metabolism, and without a metabolism your stops working. There are drugs to take that can give you a metabolism. The trick is knowing how much. Every person is different and it is not dependent on weight or height. Basically you feel like crap until the meds are adjusted which takes a few months.

And what does this have to do with fertility? Well the day I got the go ahead to start my first IVF cycle after all the tests etc. was the day I found out I had cancer. I was on the phone with the IVF doctor when the cancer doctor called. Too much. Really. After my surgery the first thing I asked when I could think was can I still do my IVF cycle. I’m lying in bed barely able to speak unable to really move my head and all I could do was focus on that. When the cancer doctor said no I’d have to wait six months because I’d have to do some aggressive follow up treatment since the tumor had touched muscle I just cried and cried and cried.

In fact it’s safe to say I never really dealt with the cancer because I was much more focused on wanting to have a baby. Now that we are pregnant (25 weeks) I guess I’m finally wondering to myself if I actually dealt with everything I went through. I don’t know that I have.

Maybe some of you know what I mean – I mean about not dealing with other big huge things in life because fertility/infertility completely takes over. Has that happened to anyone else?

what if the other shoe never drops?

Next Monday is the 6 month or 24 week check up. It’s hard for me to believe. Still. All the baggage from the years of trying does not simply get put into storage. It’s more like a suitcase that I still carry around with me. I don’t know that it’s necessarily bad. Or that I want to forget. Actually I know I don’t want to forget. What I struggle with is how to feel at peace with where i am now, with full acceptance, with not worrying that something terrible will happen. But I guess terrible things do always happen and maybe all I can hope for is that I have the strength and wisdom to deal with things as they come up. Sometimes it’s hard to just be happy without the worry. My husband was also saying he’s worried because everything is going so well for us now. We’ve been so used to not having things go the way we’d hoped that now that we are we’re worried because everything is too good. Is this normal? I don’t know.

What I do know is im feeling cautiously optimistic about this pregnancy and about having a healthy birth. The little one kicks a lot now. Or I feel the kicks more often, take your pick. That’s the optimist part. The cautious part is my husband and I have not thought about names, we have not gone shopping for things yet and we wont have a baby shower (we’re way too superstitious). But that’s fine.

What else…oh! People have been asking us if the future little one is a boy or a girl. we opted for not knowing. For us after so much medicalization and knowing almost too much we wanted to have this be a surprise.

On making the choice to go with a donor

When I started this blog we’d already made the choice to go with a donor, had found our donor in fact and were waiting to cycle. We were at peace with our path. BUT getting to that point was not easy. I mean we didn’t just wake up and say lets do this. We didn’t just embrace donor egg. We didn’t just say hey, what a great idea. In fact it would be more accurate to say that I felt like saying f$%#! off to our doctor when he mentioned that I was a great candidate for this option after try number 3. My husband who loves tough odds said if we just persevere we’ll be fine. I was pretty sure too. After all I couldn’t be one of those people who’d have to resort to that now could I?! Besides I was just 37 had great responses, great fertilization results and we knew from our previous miscarriages that carrying a baby wasn’t the issue. Patience was what we needed. Patience we had.

But it kept not working.

After the 5th try our doctor mentioned it again. We said oh we’d like to keep trying. He said fine. This time I cried when I got off the phone with Doctor XY. I couldn’t be the one that had to go THAT route is basically what I thought. Again we reasoned it was a matter of perseverance that even with a less that 5% chance there was still a chance. And then the EPHIPHANY: I went to see my acupuncturist and he, looking like Buddha with soft lighting behind him, said it doesn’t matter how you have a child (natural, donor, adoption) the right soul will find you. And that gave me pause. It made (it makes) sense to me. For the first time I really thought, hmm…I could do that.

But we didn’t.

After the 6th try and another donor suggestion from doctor XY my husband and I had a long talk and I had a long (several day) cry. Our chances were less than 1% of conceiving with my eggs. We decided to go in and meet the head of the DE program who we naturally hated because we had not fully accepted needing to be there in the first place. We were still scheduled to try again with IVF/PGD, we just said to ourselves this is how we cover all our bases. This way we have a back up plan and we need to do this now because it can take 6mnths to a year to find a match.

Shortly after we sent in our application the fabulous nurse we’d worked with over the past year called and said she had the perfect donor for us. She said I just want you to know she’s here for you. She sent us her information (as much as we were allowed to see in an anonymous donor situation) and in fact, we liked what we saw. We actually never looked at anyone else. Maybe it’s strange but I’ve never had any doubts, and neither did my husband, that she was the right donor for us. I guess that is because at this point the idea of the soul and the letting go of the mini me had taken over and it did not seem so important that the details of the donor (length of fingers, size of eyes, type of hair, etc. things that had originally seemed of the utmost importance) mattered so much.

But we wanted to try again.

After the 7th try well…devastation. naturally. Again. This time we talked openly with our doc about a donor…he strongly urged us to do it while also supporting us if we wanted to try again with my eggs although he was clear that it would be random luck to get pregnant with my eggs. He also said that even the fertilized egg that past the PGD test might still not be ok because they can’t test for everything. In other words the odds were, given our past history, that there would be something wrong with it. We’d gone from a 20% chance of success when we started to actually not having a percentage chance at all. This was what got us. We’d gone beyond percentages. Well that and the opinion of two other doctors.

So then…

We started to feel lucky that we had another option for us to experience pregnancy/birth. And then I started this blog because I felt alone, and scared and I found all these other blogs and wonderful women and well that’s the short version of the beginning of our story.

Hopefully this post wasn’t too long.

letting go

Kami has a very interesting post at Are We There Yet – discussing her feelings about being a donor recipient. Certainly for me coming to terms with this has not been fluid…I’ve mourned the genetic loss and occasionally still do even as my own history of never knowing my biological father and being adopted by my non genetic dad makes me realize how unnecessary genetic continuity is in creating a family. I get angry or resentful of people who seem so cavalier about pregnancy – this time I want a girl, or the just we wanted to have a baby and two months later voila, preggers…or even the we want more children…all the things the “fertile world” says. I resent the way they take their fertility for granted even as I understand that it’s totally normal to do. Why should you ever think it could be a problem? But it can be, it is. And then I think that this experience, the losses, the trying, the pain and sadness that my husband and I have gone through, that has made us appreciate this precious growing life in a way I don’t know we would have been able to do had we not gone through all that we have.

Finally I really believe as I posted on kami’s site:
To me it seems natural to mourn or be angry at the genetic loss while understanding that genetic code is only one part of what makes us who we are. it’s important to make peace with conceiving through DE. For me it’s an ongoing process (part of which I deal with by telling people about it). That said I know in my heart when our little one is born (hoping that all continues to go well) the fact that we used DE wont make one bit of difference.

Thankfully love is not based on genetic code.

On our little one front: more movement. i had a moment of panic the other day when i thought when was the last time i felt anything...instantly morbid thoughts flooded my brain...it is so easy to get pulled into those dark thoughts...the trauma of infertility has a long reach.

And on the spreading the news front:

I’ve now told my two closest friends. they had interesting reactions.
Friend one said: I sensed there was something you weren’t saying but I was scared to ask because I thought it would be something bad because of your previous history. She was so relieved and happy for us. It was nice to hear.
Friend two said: That’s amazing. I didn’t know about that and it gives me hope (she’s single in her late 30’s and wants children) and it seems like a nice option besides adoption.

We decided to tell people now because I just had my 20 week scan and everything is GREAT!!!! I really felt like I was being dishonest before. After all, as I’ve said before we are proud of our SUPER HIGH TECH WUNDER CHILD and grateful that we had this option. The main reason we weren’t saying anything or the two main ones were:
1. fear that the pregnancy would not be viable
2. we’d gotten used to not talking about anything related to fertility – it’s just been so painful.

So now we’re just spreading the news of how we conceived. It feels, for me, like a BIG HUGE BURDEN has been lifted. What a relief.

Oh and the best for the last: I started feeling the little one kick and move last week. I was lying in bed reading and felt these two little movements. I almost cried. I never thought I’d feel that, or get to this point. They are very soft pushes on the inside of my lower belly. Like if someone was to gently poke you in the abdomen with their finger. Now I’m feeling them everyday. Maybe now, at 21 weeks i'm finally starting to relax, just a tiny bit and accept that things just may continue to be ok and normal as far as pregnancy goes. It's a strange feeling, not used to it at all.

Books

Wow…time moves fast. I didn’t realize how long it had been since my last post. Got buried under a work tsunami.

So, as promised, here are some books that my husband and I read as we thought about telling or not telling:

1. Telling and Talking about Donor Conception with 0-7 year olds. A guide for parents. This is put out by the donor conception network a non profit group based in England. It’s very slim with useful information AND quotes from parents discussing telling, not telling and other related experiences like enrolling children in school. It’s very straightforward. We liked that there were so many examples from actual parents for very common situations.
2. Flight of the Stork What Children thnk (and When) about Sex and Family Building by Anne C. Bernstein. This is not about if or when you should tell but, as the title says how to speak to a child in an age appropriate way. Since we don’t have much experience speaking to kids this was interesting.
3. Having your Baby Through Egg Donation By Ellen Sarasohn Glazer. This one is mostly for those thinking about egg donation although there are a few pages about Parenthood and suggestions on whom you might want to tell. I’d say not necessary if you’ve already taken the decision to go the donor route.
4. Experiences of Donor Conception. Parents, Offspring and Donors through the Years. Caroline Lorbach. Another book we really liked and found useful probably for the same reasons we liked the Telling and Talking book – although this has many more pages – we like the quotes and interviews from people who have gone through the experiences. There is also a section of essays by donor conceived adults none of whom knew from birth about their special conception. It’s interesting though, what I found really helpful, again, is what the parents of donor children had to say about their own choices and experiences.


If there’s a book or site about donor conception that you like please let me know.