Waiting on Sunshine: pt. 5/6

A few weeks after the newest sweet little girl was born, in the fall of 2019, Daniel and I were sitting in the office of a fertility clinic. Sometime before getting to this moment I’d reached a point of frustration. I was being driven crazy by this feeling that our daughter was out there but Daniel didn’t seem to have the same drive. After Baby Girl left a year earlier (in pt. 3) Daniel said he too felt like a girl was coming, but I was starting to feel like maybe he was just humoring me. I had a breakdown where I told him I felt like he didn’t actually want another child, that he was just going to say no to every situation that ever presented itself, that I was the only one who actually thought she was out there and she was never going to really come. After listening to me Daniel said, “hang on” and left the room. He came back less than a minute later and handed me a bag. Inside was a soft blanket with a little pink owl in the corner. He was so sure a girl was coming to our family that several months earlier he’d bought this blanket without me knowing and stored it away for the girl we both knew was coming. I of course sobbed hysterically at that point. We were on the same page, and somehow, some way she’d eventually get here.

Things had settled into a comfortable rhythm at home and we were going to try opening one more door for our girl to get to our family. Neither of us felt strongly that we should do IVF but we agreed that even if our girl didn’t come that way then I would at least get closure that biological children really just can’t happen for us. We’d done fertility treatments years earlier with no success beyond repeat miscarriages, and we’d been casually trying to get pregnant since then. There are a lot of things working against me being able to get pregnant, most of which I’ve covered on this blog (endometriosis, repeat miscarriages, and others). We already knew our next step was IVF and now, about 7 years after we’d last done fertility treatments, we could handle the cost.

A quick explanation of IVF if you’re not familiar with the process. You go to an infertility clinic and they run a bunch of tests on all aspects of your reproductive system. If everything is looking generally okay they move forward with an extensive regimen of shots that cause your ovaries to produce many eggs (a typical natural cycle produces one egg) and to keep you from ovulating on your own. After many blood draws and ultrasounds over a few weeks you reach the point where they harvest your eggs. You go under sedation and they use a giant needle to extract all the available eggs from the ovaries. Then they put the ovaries and sperm together in the lab and let nature take its course. They then watch the fertilized egg grow to a blastocyst for either 3 or 5 days. When they reach the 3 or 5 day mark they can either be transferred to the uterus or frozen, this is also the stage where genetic testing is done. Each time going through that process (through harvest) is called “a round” of IVF. IVF is crazy expensive ($15-20k per round) unless you work for an employer with more modern benefits or you qualify for a medical study (endometriosis patients are almost always excluded from studies). We unfortunately had neither of those benefits.

First we had to decide how many rounds of IVF to do. You have to pay up front and there are all these different packages to choose from. If you pay for two rounds then the price per round is slightly lower, the more you buy the lower the unit price. Yeah, they price out $15k attempts at having a child the same way they price canned beans at Kroger. We decided to do two rounds. A failed single round could be a fluke, but if we had two failed rounds I thought it would be easier to accept that pregnancy will just never happen again for us.

It’s expected to lose opportunity at each step. First not all the follicles they try to extract eggs from will have an egg, then not all eggs will fertilize, and then not all fertilized eggs make it to day 5 of growth for either use or freezing, and lastly not all day-5 embryos are genetically compatible with life. Because of our repeat miscarriages our embryos would need genetic testing, and for an extra charge we could find out gender along with the genetic screening. The idea behind genetic testing is to figure out which embryos would end in miscarriage and which could survive, then use a viable embryo with the best chance of survival.

The first round of IVF we got 15 eggs (not bad, pretty average), 12 fertilized (above average percentage!). The average for 12 fertilized eggs would be about 6 embryos making it to day 5. We needed just one embryo to make it but on day 5 we had zero. Not one of our embryos made it to day 5.

We’d paid for two rounds though, so we got started again. This time we got 15 eggs again, only 9 fertilized this time (around average fertilization rate), but this time one little embryo made it to day 5. They biopsied our embryo to do the genetic screening and gender check and then froze it. One little embryo. We were trying to bring our one girl to our family, maybe this was her. We hoped hard that our one embryo was a genetically viable girl.

When they called with the results I learned our lucky little embryo was genetically normal! But also a boy. Our one embryo to survive out of 30 eggs was a boy.

I was confused and frustrated. I’d had such a clear feeling for years that there was a girl coming. Yes, I’d also felt like she was already born but maybe that was just weird wishful thinking. We had one lucky embryo who’d managed to make it through all the reproductive hurdles of my body and it was a boy? Why? How? Out of so many eggs, after so many years, after feeling so sure a girl was coming, how and why did our one viable embryo turn out to be a boy?

We didn’t know what to do about our newly created little boy embryo so we decided to take some time and figure it out. Then, a month later we got the call for our next foster daughter.

A couple weeks before Christmas 2019 our next little girl was placed in our home. She was a quiet, sweet little toddler and she and her mom had been through a lot. I set to work doing what I always do in a case, loving her and loving and supporting her mom. With this case we had a new caseworker, Kevin (not his real name, he comes back later). There was a small part of me that wondered if she would stay but I knew that wasn’t for me to think about, this was someone else’s child and it was my job to love her and her family. Her case went along and after about 6 weeks (including Christmas) she too was on her way.

There wasn’t this feeling of “dang it another girl left!” I wanted her to get home to her mom. When you get attached and love hard as a foster parent then a child going home to a good situation and a parent who loves them is the best thing.

I didn’t know what to do about our girl though. I still had this feeling, becoming more constant, that there was a girl coming to our family. I told Daniel I wished the feeling would just go away, because it was driving me crazy feeling like she’s out there and I have no idea how to get to her. I kept trying to push it away and attribute the feeling to one of those unpleasant side effects of infertility. I tried to talk myself out of it, that this feeling must be because we’d tried for 10 years to get pregnant and this was one of those lingering parts of trying to get someone here who wasn’t yet. It was maddening. It was this constant feeling that I had a daughter somewhere but there was nothing to be done about it on my end. I prayed that if she was already out there that she would have comfort through whatever hard circumstances she was in and that I would be prepared to be her mother whenever that might be.

Waiting on Sunshine: pt. 6/6