Post by PNWMom on Apr 29, 2016 3:27:00 GMT
I feel like I have so much going on in my head right now, I might just pop. Good things, stressful things, crappy things. Just things.
I had cancer back in 2013, just as we were finally starting to 'try' to have a baby. Ended up freezing 8 embryos for IVF 2 days before I started chemo. Fast forward 2 years.....I got the OK from my oncologist to get pregnant in September last year. So we went back to the fertility people and got going. By December, we had paid about $20k and had gone from 8 original embryos to only 2 surviving to the blastocyte stage. Found out in January that one of those embryos has a chromosome issue (not compatible with life), and the other has the mutation that caused my breast cancer. And is female (88% likelihood that she will develop breast cancer during her lifetime).
Still with me?
So, in March we decide to go forward in an attempt to get some more eggs from me. I am 38, but my ovaries were very aged by the chemo. I took $5k worth of meds so strong I was having visual hallucinations. Well, actually I took only about $1k of the meds I bought, because we had to cancel the entire attempt after 7 days of shots and 3 weeks of pills showed zero response whatsoever from one ovary, and almost nothing on the other one. So no more eggs are possible from me.
That sucked. A fairly crappy day.
And now, we have a new plan. An exciting plan. An expensive plan. We are going to use the female embryo we have. At least we know what she will deal with, and we know we can help her to have IVF someday so maybe *she* can be the one to stop the passing on of this crappy gene. So the frozen embryo transfer process will start in another week or two (waiting for my period to start). I am hoping to be pregnant by Father's Day (which also happens to be my husband's 40th birthday)
At the same time......my younger sister (just turned 36) has been a surrogate twice, and has now offered me her eggs. My fertility clinic is going to contact her and get some baseline labs to make sure she can actually do this, but that is our secondary plan. Hopefully have a pregnancy right now with the BRCA positive female embryo I have, then wait 6 months or so after that baby and have a second pregnancy with a BRCA negative male embryo. Then get my ovaries out ASAP, because I am supposed to have them out by age 40. I will probably actually *be* 40 if this all works out with 2 pregnancies.
So. Exciting, yes?? But so stressful. So very expensive, and so many things that can not go our way, and so much stress all around for a variety of reasons. My sister has a different BRCA mutation (extremely rare, but we have 2 mutations in my family) which is not clear cut like mine--it may not be medically significant but they are not sure. But it come's from my dad's family, and there is a TON of cancer there (pancreatic, breast, prostate, appendiceal, cervical--and this is just among my dad and his siblings and parents!!), so we will pay another $5k to have testing to not pass on THAT mutation as well. I figure if we are paying a billion dollars for these babies, we may as well pay the extra $$ to weed out the ones with the genetic issues.
We just had some heart to hearts and we (really, this is being led by my husband) feel that we make good money and we work hard and we are good people and we deserve to have the family we want to have. I reallyreallyreally want a son who looks just like my husband. And our ideal world would be boy/girl twins. So we will build our family the way we want to.
It just feels so ridiculous. I am SO not this person. Not someone who would have EVER pursued anything fertility-wise. We only got into this because of the cancer diagnosis. Where I was basically told to give them $10k within the next month or I would never have a biological child of my own. Which was totally true. So we forked over our savings and started down this path. We are not wealthy (I am an RN; my husband is a locksmith), but we are good at saving/planning for the future/retirement, so we can make this work financially. No more vacations or spending on pretty much anything, but we can make it happen.
So overall, good things and lots to look forward to (hopefully). But lots of stress because of the $$ and the potential for all of this to explode in our faces and still end up with no baby whatsoever at the end of this road. I don't think I really have a point here. Just more an explosive vent of stressful excitement and an uncertain future.
I had cancer back in 2013, just as we were finally starting to 'try' to have a baby. Ended up freezing 8 embryos for IVF 2 days before I started chemo. Fast forward 2 years.....I got the OK from my oncologist to get pregnant in September last year. So we went back to the fertility people and got going. By December, we had paid about $20k and had gone from 8 original embryos to only 2 surviving to the blastocyte stage. Found out in January that one of those embryos has a chromosome issue (not compatible with life), and the other has the mutation that caused my breast cancer. And is female (88% likelihood that she will develop breast cancer during her lifetime).
Still with me?
So, in March we decide to go forward in an attempt to get some more eggs from me. I am 38, but my ovaries were very aged by the chemo. I took $5k worth of meds so strong I was having visual hallucinations. Well, actually I took only about $1k of the meds I bought, because we had to cancel the entire attempt after 7 days of shots and 3 weeks of pills showed zero response whatsoever from one ovary, and almost nothing on the other one. So no more eggs are possible from me.
That sucked. A fairly crappy day.
And now, we have a new plan. An exciting plan. An expensive plan. We are going to use the female embryo we have. At least we know what she will deal with, and we know we can help her to have IVF someday so maybe *she* can be the one to stop the passing on of this crappy gene. So the frozen embryo transfer process will start in another week or two (waiting for my period to start). I am hoping to be pregnant by Father's Day (which also happens to be my husband's 40th birthday)
At the same time......my younger sister (just turned 36) has been a surrogate twice, and has now offered me her eggs. My fertility clinic is going to contact her and get some baseline labs to make sure she can actually do this, but that is our secondary plan. Hopefully have a pregnancy right now with the BRCA positive female embryo I have, then wait 6 months or so after that baby and have a second pregnancy with a BRCA negative male embryo. Then get my ovaries out ASAP, because I am supposed to have them out by age 40. I will probably actually *be* 40 if this all works out with 2 pregnancies.
So. Exciting, yes?? But so stressful. So very expensive, and so many things that can not go our way, and so much stress all around for a variety of reasons. My sister has a different BRCA mutation (extremely rare, but we have 2 mutations in my family) which is not clear cut like mine--it may not be medically significant but they are not sure. But it come's from my dad's family, and there is a TON of cancer there (pancreatic, breast, prostate, appendiceal, cervical--and this is just among my dad and his siblings and parents!!), so we will pay another $5k to have testing to not pass on THAT mutation as well. I figure if we are paying a billion dollars for these babies, we may as well pay the extra $$ to weed out the ones with the genetic issues.
We just had some heart to hearts and we (really, this is being led by my husband) feel that we make good money and we work hard and we are good people and we deserve to have the family we want to have. I reallyreallyreally want a son who looks just like my husband. And our ideal world would be boy/girl twins. So we will build our family the way we want to.
It just feels so ridiculous. I am SO not this person. Not someone who would have EVER pursued anything fertility-wise. We only got into this because of the cancer diagnosis. Where I was basically told to give them $10k within the next month or I would never have a biological child of my own. Which was totally true. So we forked over our savings and started down this path. We are not wealthy (I am an RN; my husband is a locksmith), but we are good at saving/planning for the future/retirement, so we can make this work financially. No more vacations or spending on pretty much anything, but we can make it happen.
So overall, good things and lots to look forward to (hopefully). But lots of stress because of the $$ and the potential for all of this to explode in our faces and still end up with no baby whatsoever at the end of this road. I don't think I really have a point here. Just more an explosive vent of stressful excitement and an uncertain future.
