Monday, April 23, 2012

Don't Ignore...

.. the fact that you were the result of your mother's one successful pregnancy

.. your weird menstrual cycles and crippling abdominal pain

.. the total and complete lack of any oops/uh-oh moments in all those years of haphazard BCP use

Don't ignore the signs. Learn more.

National Infertility Awareness Week
Resolve.org

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Step One: Remove Cat From Bag

We did it.

We've now told our parents about our infertility, our diagnosis and our treatments. We've told them about our decision to pursue a donor egg cycle. They were unanimous in their excitement and support of the choices we have made.

And exhale.

My Mom's initial response was "Well you know, I had to take fertility pills to get you!" Uhhhh... I have no memory of this, though she insists she told me years ago. I was born when she was only 27. All I could think was... even if we had tossed the birth control in our twenties, we might still have been unable to conceive without assistance. I suddenly feel a lot less guilty for waiting.

Whoa.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Other "Other Side"

Mali has a great post on transitions and the concept of success/failure within the ALI community. Specifically, as these apply to those living without children after infertility. As someone recently weighing this option against my current path to DEIVF (and fully aware that this may yet be my ultimate outcome), I appreciate her continued presence in this community.

Go read her post.

Monday, April 9, 2012

One Small Step

We had our Donor Egg consultation and I gotta say... we are pretty psyched.

The donor egg program at our clinic is a very small program that uses exclusively local anonymous donors. Because of this and due to the fact that this is not a large metropolitan area, they do not offer photos of the donors. Instead, our RE meets all potential donors personally and tries to make the best possible visual match after considering all of our stated preferences. He then presents the best match/es to us for approval. I continue to waffle about how this makes me feel... a little nervous at times and totally unconcerned at others. Prof actually prefers NOT to see a photo because he worries that the donor's face will stick in his memory where he doesn't want it. In the grand scheme of things the lack of photos is not a deal breaker, mostly because we truly trust our RE and I believe he will have our best interests in mind when selecting which donors to present to us.

When filling out the donor requirements form, we realized we're actually pretty flexible on the vast majority of physical options. First thoughts say the donor should look like me, but the more we thought about it we realized that even with my genetics in play, there is a surprisingly wide variety of physical traits that could express. As we considered the physical characteristics represented in each of our families, we realized that height, hair and eye color could be almost any combination and still fit in.

So, our only hard criteria are: college educated, proven fertility, light skinned Caucasian.

First step is a psych evaluation followed by a repeat of my HSG and some blood work that has expired. The whole process should take 3-6 months. The most amazing thing about it all is how peaceful I feel.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Points of Discussion

I thought that for posterity and the benefit of anyone else who is struggling with deciding between DEIVF and childless/free living, I would post a list of the points that Prof and I touched on during our week of daily discussions.
  • Feeling that we are "tempting fate" and we will land on the bad side of the statistics again.
  • Fear of being unable to protect our child or sufficiently control the environment.
  • Fear of allowing child to supplant spouse in importance.
  • There is NO GOING BACK.
  • We don't want to raise children in our current location... this means a probable move out of the country.
  • We need to seek out more parenting success stories to balance out all of the negatives we see.
  • We are no longer afraid of living childfree since we've been doing that all along, so it feels safer.
It seems like a lot of "negatives", but the point was really to address our fears so that we could move forward. One comforting thought we tossed around was the acknowledgement that it is easier to conquer your fears when you have someone else to be brave FOR.

Somehow, the act of airing these concerns and writing them down took a lot of their power away. They are all still there, but they are no longer holding us back.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Where Did YOU Start?

To all of you who have done DEIVF not using a known donor, how did you find your donor?

Our clinic has an in-house anonymous donor program that is very reasonable with no waiting list. We will probably go this route, however... it's uber-anonymous since our town is kinda small, so they don't offer any photos of the donors. I understand the reasoning, but this means we will have no way of knowing to what degree the donor resembles me beyond a description of height/weight/hair/eyes/skin.

I'd like to know what my options might be for finding a donor outside of my clinic, but there's a lot information out there and I don't trust it all implicitly. Did you use an agency you feel you could recommend? Any good links you could share would be appreciated.