Thursday, August 25, 2011

The adoption option

Many of you may not know about the phone calls we've had about adoption but it's actually happened four times now. The first time it was a 3-week-old little girl but guess what? They changed their minds. The next was a pregnant teenager but the family decided to take care of that baby. The next was a set of twin boys. These boys didn't even have names. They were calling them baby A and baby B. :( We seriously considered this one but then the grandparents decided to take them. Now Tuesday we got another call. There's a 15-year-old girl who is pregnant in the town where I live and they are looking for potential adoptive parents. We decided that we just aren't there yet and even if we were, it can be taken away from you as quickly as it comes. Not that I'm not happy that people change their minds and decide to raise their children but I don't think I'm ready to commit to it then someone tell me, "Never mind now." So many people love to tell you to JUST adopt (and yes, they always put the word "just" in front of it like it's such a simple choice) but it's not that easy. And yes I would love for someone to hand me their newborn and then disappear until my child turns 18 but as you can see that doesn't always happen. I need to work through my issues of longing for a child who is half me and half Brad. I know that may seem selfish but it's how I feel and I think every happily married couple deserves to feel this way. I'm not ready to adopt yet. I'm just not. And I think that's ok. When I've had enough shots, follicle counts, retrievals and transfers, I'll know.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Things are looking up!

Two pieces of good news to report for once! First of all my stomach has finally went back to normal (mostly) so I don't look three months pregnant anymore. I am so thankful for this. There's nothing worse than looking pregnant without a baby inside of you. Secondly, my kids at school are super good this year. I had such a difficult year last year and it was very stressful to miss school so much for all of my treatments. Now that my class is good, I will feel confident taking off in October to transfer my little frozen baby. I feel ok for the first time in weeks.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Congratulations

I started back to school this week so I wanted Brad to take me out to eat Friday night to celebrate the week's end. With this pretend pregnant belly still visible, it's hard to find the right clothes to fit without looking preggo. I wore this black dress that had plenty of room, so I thought.

When we finished eating, I was waiting for Brad to get out of the bathroom so we could leave. I noticed some crumbs on my dress so I was brushing them off. These crumbs happened to be on my stomach and a waitress walked by as I was doing this and said, "Congratulations!" I said, "No, I'm not. I just look like I am." She of course apologized and then I explained that we did IVF and it didn't work and that was why I looked pregnant. Then she asked how old I was and when I told her I was 33 she was like, "Oh! I thought you were around my age." I assume she's much younger than me and was going to say at least you're still young. I'm glad she didn't say that. It would've poured even more salt into my wound. GO AWAY PREGNANT BELLY THAT HAS NO BABY!!!!!!!!


Saturday, August 6, 2011

Inflated

So have any of the rest of you post IVF girls had trouble with a pregnant looking stomach? It's been 23 days since my retrieval and I'm still really bloated. If I had gotten pregnant I would love this belly but since it didn't work it's a constant reminder of what I don't have. Plus I am a a teacher and we are getting ready to return to school. Won't it be fun when people ask me if I'm pregnant and I'll have to reply,"No,I'm just fat now."

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

3 choices

So the actual doctor called me today! He first told me how sorry he was that it didn't work. He said after over 25 years he still lays awake at night wondering why perfectly good cycles don't work. He also said that so much is still out of our control which we all know is true. He told me the eggs were good quality for my age and so were the embryos so everything went well. I just didn't get pregnant. :(

Next he went over 3 choices for our next steps. One option is to transfer the one frozen emby and see if it works. He explained that frosties don't have good success rates when compared to fresh but it could work. Second option would be to try another fresh and hopefully we'd produce enough to freeze some to put with the one we already have. Then if the fresh worked we could use those later. If it didn't work then we'd have more than one frozen to transfer the next time. The third option is to try another round of injectables and not do IVF at all. He said now that we know the egg/embryo quality, we may not have to spend all this money to get pregnant after all. The downside with that is you don't know what's going on during those cycles. You don't know if the egg is getting fertilized or the quality of the embryo. You also can't control how many you fertilize, example Jon and Kate.

So we had already decided we wanted to try the frozen transfer so he said we can call on CD 1 whenever we are ready. Although I'm happy the IVF cycle went well, I almost wish something would go wrong so we could fix it.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Frozen emby

We just got the call from the IVF nurse about our next steps. Thankfully we do not have to travel all the way to Ohio! Apparently everything can be done over the phone so that was great news since school is starting Monday. The nurse said the doctor would want to do a FET with our little blast. I did ask about the possibility of it dying before transfer and she agreed that it could happen but we had a strong one frozen. She said we could try it anytime we felt ready. We aren't ready yet.

She said the doctor would call us around Thursday when he gets back into town and we could ask him questions about the next procedure and about our failed cycle. We are curious about what he thinks went wrong, if there are any explanations at all. We are also wondering about something we've read about recently called immunologic implantation dysfunction. Basically it's where your body sees embryos as a foreign object and attacks it. It can be prior to implantation or after. I have no idea if I'm even a candidate for testing of that sort but we would like to get some things figured out before trying again. I just want to give my little frosty every chance it needs to survive.