**fair warning. This one may be a TMI**
This was not a Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am Experience! It's 8:23pm.
Tomorrow, my hopeful future baby is going to be inserted into me by my doctor while Mike sits beside me holding my hand and 2 nurses run about the room.
In this glorious situation, the procedure room will be conveniently next door to the lab, and I will be place in a way that my lady bits are exposed perfectly between the doorway for all to see.
Ahh. The bliss.
This may not be the actual moment of conception but it wasn't romantic either.
After weeks of hormone treatments and mood swings (yes, mine) from inserting pills in my lady love tunnel while simultaneously injecting meds into my belly fat multiple times a day, it was finally the day it all meant something.
Well, it meant we were part way through the process of 'creating' our children.
This was a way we chose to take our journey so we wouldn't pass on an autosomal dominant genetic disease (50% chance our children would inherit it).
We were, and are, incredibly fortunate enough to have access to specialized care and the support and cheques to finance it.
We were nearly done with the 3 hour commutes to and from the city at the most ungodly hours trying to avoid typical city rush hour traffic *insert headache here* #firstworldproblems
Retrieval Time
We walked into the hospital, my ovaries feeling like 20lb weights and nauseous as hell, which couldn't be helped because of all the medications, not being allowed to eat breakfast and already being awake for 4 hours.
They took our names and I sat down in the waiting area with the hubby.
Soon after they asked him to step out into the private rooms to hold up his end of the bargain.
His contribution that day - masturbating in a cup
Part of me was annoyed by him that morning as he complained about the strange arrangement and felt like everyone knew what he was gone off to do. (reminder: majorly high hormones and exhaustion)
All I could muster for support was, "Have fun!"
Given everything else, that part of the IVF deal was the easy bit.
While I partly hated him for being so anxious about a relatively simple act that dudes all over the place do on a regular basis, I couldn't believe that somehow this was a challenge.
A challenging experience is subjective of course, but when I had been pumping myself full of hormones and feeling like utter hell, while knowing the procedure we were sitting there for was, for lack of better explanation, a long needle going into my vagina to pierce through the wall of my body and find every egg to extract, his task seemed pretty minor.
I wasn't in the mood for what felt like a masturbation pity party
My patience and anxiety were at their extremes.
So there we were.
He had taken care of business and I was already hooked up to an IV pole requesting Gravol. The nausea was killing me.
They took us into the room and I laid on the stretcher with my legs spread open, lady bits exposed, my heart racing and guts anxious.
I requested extra medication to knock me out as the first time I'd gone through the procedure I woke up part way through and could recall the intensity of the pain.
It still makes me cringe.
So, they agreed and started me with an increased dose.
The dose barely knocked me out and they started the procedure anyways.
I tried to work through the pain holding in how awful it truly was. Crying and cringing, I requested more drugs but they kept telling me they were almost through.
I held Mike's hand so tight I'm surprised it didn't break.
I was so conflicted mentally and physically.
I felt as if I was literally being tortured and yet
I had asked for all of this to happen.
All I could do was breathe and coach myself internally, "You have to do this. You don't want your kids to grow up with the same fears you did. You don't want them to go through a devastating test result. You don't want their lives to be limited. You don't want them to die from HD".
It was a f*cked up situation.
As an emergency nurse, I've honestly seen people more consciously sedated when getting a joint dislocation back in place. Yet, there I was, not getting more drugs to have my vagina poked with a needle multiple times!
After Retrieval: Immediate
After retrieval, I had to go to recovery for a bit. I was pretty mad about the whole under medicated thing but it wasn't worth worrying about. My concern shifted to thinking,
"How many did they get?
Will it be enough?
What if they didn't get any good ones?"
I'm not someone with fertility issues and neither is my husband.
From all our pre-IVF testing, we could actually have a baby the way most other people do - we could have fun!
However, due to our familial genetic disease with no cure, we chose to take a safe route and protect our children.
I know not everyone would agree with this, but I respect people making alternate choices and only ask that mine be respected as well.
Lord knows, I did enough research and informed decision making to get where I am today.
So if you disagree, please feel free to leave my page immediately, or be enlightened with my stories.
Anyways, we drove home knowing that someone was using a bunch of lab tools to separate our eggs and combine them with the sperm.
From what I gathered, they take a tiny needle and insert a good and healthy appearing sperm into a good egg. Then voila. They let them grow and the cells multiply to create an embryo - our future fetus - our little baby.
After Retrieval: The Following Week
Almost every day over the next week they tell you how many are developing successfully.
Which to me, actually really sucks.
It's literally saying how many possible babies you've lost that day.
To be fair to the medical team and the process, there are embryos (fertilized eggs) that otherwise wouldn't have fertilized or grown into a fetus naturally (recall: the lab literally places the sperm in the egg- a forced conception).
Regardless, the phone call is still tough.
"Oh Hi. Today you have 18"
"Oh Hi. Today you have 15"
"Oh Hi. Today you have 13" "Oh Hi. Today you have 13"
......Oh shit. Hello!? 13 again? Are you sure? WOW!!!!!! NO LOSSES! *insert personal party here!* "Oh Hi. Today you have 9" ......Bitch.
So 9.
I really shouldn't complain about 9, but it was less than our first round that was 11 and honestly most people going through IVF are happy to have 1.
That meant 9 that needed to get tested for the disease. A disease with a 50% pass on rate for EACH embryo.
So even though it's not mathematically correct, you're likely thinking, ok, that's 4 or 5. That should be good! Who wants 5 kids anyways?
Nope.
Again, It's 50% PER embryo.
So with bad luck they could all be positive for the disease.
AKA. Have it.
Results:
Our first round of IVF started with 24 eggs extracted and went down to 11 for DNA testing before implantation (PGD).
When various genetic tests were complete, we had just 2 at the end that would grow normally and be free from Huntingtons!
Our first egg implant of the two grew to be our gorgeous daughter, and the second ended in a complicated miscarriage - something I will touch on another time.
Our second round of IVF was this round I've detailed about.
Thankfully for us, we had 6 come back normal!
What a f*cking relief that was! I actually couldn't believe my ears when I heard it from the doctors mouth!
Throughout the whole process of trying to get pregnant, we were so incredibly focused on not screwing it up the "natural way".
Condoms always.
Birth control always.
There was no damn way all of that dedication and hard work was going to waste.
Our mental and physical health was at the brink of failure on a number of occasions throughout the process.
I, for one, thought I was fairly stable throughout all the meds, given my usual fluctuations anyways.
However, hindsight is a glorious and cruel thing, presently allowing me to see that I was a complete disaster and barely holding on.
Going through all of this while also dealing with a recent life changing diagnosis and minimal support (we didn't tell anyone about my diagnosis or that we were doing IVF) was no walk in the park, but the details of those decisions will certainly be elaborated on through another post.
That was it. That was the MAGICAL journey we took to create our future babies.
Of course, a lot of details omitted, positives and negatives left unsaid.
But you get the point - this post is long enough!
Which is, it was in no way a romantic experience or one that is easily summed up as a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am.
So anyways, here were are with 6 frozen embryos.
Tonight, I'm waiting for tomorrow.
Waiting for the day our future sweetie will be medically placed in me.
They will surely cheer and high-five.
Just kidding, no one does that.
Except us.
Imagine if they did though?
