I’m really glad I had the weekend to decompress and that I’m a week away from spring break. I’m beyond ready for a vacation. Well…a stay-cation. Friday I watched 10 episodes of Grace and Frankie without as much as a bathroom break. I would’ve finished the whole season if Matt hadn’t come home. So yesterday Matt left to help some of our friends move. I finished Grace and Frankie. Took a nap. Watched about 12 episodes of Sister, Sister on Fuse. I did anything but think about my situation. Occasionally thoughts of being barren would enter in my mind. I just can’t hold on to them. While I watched Tia and Tamara graduate from high school I got a little choked up. What if I never get to see my child graduate? I think one reason I’ve been watching that show like its 1997 is because they’re adopted in the show. Lisa and Ray are always so proud of them. And even though they each only adopted one of the girls they are both equally in love and proud of the other’s child. It gives me hope for how I could feel about an egg donor baby. Or if we eventually have to go down the road of adoption. I’m just not sure we will have the money to consider adoption of the egg donation goes south. Not in the immediate future anyway. Plus, I’ve heard as many horror stories of failed adoptions as I have failed IVF cycles. So, nothing is guaranteed.
Last night, I decided I needed to break my diet. I mean really break it. So, I asked Matt to bring home some General Tso’s chicken. Today I’m having a bag of mini Cadbury eggs. I also had a real cup of coffee this morning. It feels nice to be a person again. Even though I know I’ll be tightening things up again tomorrow. This morning, I woke up at my new natural wake up time of 7am. I suppose this is a side effect of waking up at the exact same time every day for weeks to take morning shots. My back is still killing me from the shots. It literally hurts to lie down on my back because my back is still so sore. My uterus is still quite angry as well. I haven’t started my period but my uterus is so heavy and there’s so much pressure it literally hurts to sit up right. It’s so hard to get comfortable between that and my back and my sciatica flare up from the shots. I’m still having night sweats too. It’s so horribly cruel and unfair to have all these physical symptoms and know that not only am I not pregnant, but I’ll never be pregnant with my own child. I still don’t know if I’ll ever be pregnant. Late last night some ladies in my support group added me to some secret Facebook groups for CNY patients only. It’s been really nice connecting with other ladies getting donor eggs from the same clinic we will be going to. One piece of advice someone gave me was to pick my top 5 favorite donors in case I don’t get matched. I had initially set in my mind I would be matched with our favorite cat lady donor. But when I saw this advice, I knew I better go back and look for some more donors. I know how my life works out. Some other advice I got was to pick the youngest donors possible. That seems like solid advice. So, back to the drawing board we went. I think we spent at least 2 hours and we only looked at brunettes. I adjusted my expectations a little. Okay, so they don’t have to have green eyes. But they do need to be below 5’5’’ and have brown hair and similar ethnic backgrounds. So I looked past the terrible quality cell phone pictures and squinted a little harder. If anyone is considering donor eggs I highly recommend making a drinking game. Most of the answers on the personal question section were pretty canned. I’m pretty sure you could get really drunk if you took a shot for everyone that considered themselves “out-going and selfless” or rated their most important attributes in a friend as “trustworthy, loyal, and/or honest.” Most identified their parents or grandparents as their hero for the same reasons. I started realizing I was identifying mostly with those who seemed to have genuinely thought about egg donation and the reasons they are doing it. One lady was actually honest and said she needed the money to get through college. Kudos to her. Most people say, “I just really want to help others have something they can’t have.” My new second favorite egg donor described her friend’s struggle to get pregnant and how much that affected her. All of her answers seemed so much more authentic than all of the other donors. She doesn’t even want kids of her own. That’s the kind of person I want as my baby mama. It was interesting to see what became important to me. I saw two donors I was interested in but one had a dog allergy and one had severe nut allergies. Nope. Keep moving. One person described her favorite music as, “Anything from the 80s, especially The Beatles.” Bless her heart. I didn’t want to choose anyone who couldn’t identify a personal weakness. Really? There’s NOTHING you would change about yourself? I tended to identify with those that said things like, “I’m indecisive,” or “Sometimes I get too involved with others and get hurt.” Me too sista! I’ll put you guys on my list! One woman was very adorable and had great baby pictures. But she wrote IN ALL CAPS. Can I look past that? I ultimately decided to because I related to a lot of her answers and she’s extremely adorable, short, and has brown hair and blue eyes. I kept seeing women who listed their college GPA as 3.5 or 3.6. I had a 4.0. None of these women had a 4.0 GPA in college. Occasionally I would get a pang of jealously that these women had extra eggs to offer and most of them didn’t even have or want kids yet. So, after combing through the list for hours I picked out 6 donors for fresh eggs and two donors for banked eggs. Depending on which route we end up going. For those not savvy with donor egg lingo banked eggs are eggs that have already been retrieved and are frozen in a cryogenic bank. Fresh eggs are eggs that will be removed from the lady at the time of her choosing. I hope our number one pick will agree and will be willing to do it on her next cycle. I was feeling good about our options and apparently felt the need to go ahead and ruin that. For whatever reason I thought it would be a good idea to get on the Google machine. Why did I ever think that was a good idea?! According to the CNY website their live birth rates are: 27.7% of fresh donor eggs (fresh eggs/fresh transfer on day 5), 16.2% for frozen embryo transfers (fresh eggs/frozen transfer), and they only did 18 banked egg transfers and 5 of those resulted in a live birth. These results are from 2013 and I know the science gets better every day, but those stats are horrifying! To think we could throw another $20,000+ into this and still have a negative result. I felt betrayed by my doctors yet again. Since we first started talking about donor eggs they kept insinuating our success would be so much higher. I assumed that meant over 50%. I have heard CNY has lower rates because they do not refuse any patient. So I looked at our local clinic and they had done 19 donor transfers and 5 resulted in a live pregnancy. So, it’s almost exactly the same! For some reason they don’t break the egg donor stats out into age groups. I have to tell myself it’s all the 40+ year old women dragging down the stats. I’m now feeling much less hope about this. But I still feel like we have to try. This morning I was reading about a woman who had 7 donor eggs. Only two fertilized and one quit growing on day 2. Her only living embryo was a successful live birth. I told this to Matt and said, “Why can’t we have this kind of luck?” One embryo that works. That’s all I want. His answer was, “Our luck has to change sometime.” I think I do feel like that. Eventually things have to work out, right? I can’t consider any other alternative. Pretty much my whole life things have been hard, but it has always worked out. I really didn’t think I would get to go to college and at the last minute I got almost a full ride to school. I worked really hard and got a 4.0 GPA and graduated in 3 years. I was scrambling at the last minute to apply to graduate school because I didn’t really understand what that entailed as I was the first in my family to do so. My father lost his job right before I graduated. Again, I had no idea if I was going to get to go to graduate school. I got a job that paid for my tuition, gave me a stipend, and a place to live with a meal plan. Again, at the last minute. When I graduated I was looking for a job and wanted to live close enough so that my husband and I could finally move in together. At the last minute, I got the job of my choice. When my husband and I got married and decided to move away and start fresh somewhere new I got a job. My husband could not find a job, but at the last minute, got a job. When we bought our house the paperwork got hung up and we were almost homeless. Within the last 48 hours of our lease we finally got approved for our home and made it into our new home just in time. Everything has always worked out. This entire process I kept thinking, at the last minute our luck will change and we will get pregnant. Well that ship has sailed and we’ve had to restart the clock. We had to get a whole new clock. I have to believe that something will work. Or, could this be the one thing -- the thing that matters most -- that doesn't work out? “A flood of emotions rushes into me. Pain and anger. Sadness and pity. But most surprising of all, hope.” ― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
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Heather Joyce
Trying to conceive. Archives
April 2018
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