Favor, please

To all those TTC or those who have ever tried to conceive:

I have a favor. I am looking for some funny stories on the following topics:
1. Making Love and Making Babies are not the Same Thing - funny moments while trying to procreate. I've found that most of these moments are dictated by doctors, not by our own urges and that it stops being fun and starts being more like a chore.
2. Fun side effects from fertility drugs - everything from being tired to constipated to gaining weight and having bad skin and hair failing out (all of which happened to me)
3. Funny stories while going through an IVF or IUI cycle. For example, I did a strip tease in the hospital room before my egg retrieval for my husband before he went back to produce his half of our embryos.
4. Interesting coping mechanisms for not getting pregnant - drinking, eating sweets, buying something indulgent or other things that make us feel better when our procedures don't work.
5. Financial tales - I know someone who had a yard sale to pay for a fertility treatment; I buy HPTs at the Dollar Store, and we put most of our bills on our AmEx in order to get frequent flier points.

If you have a story or stories that fit in these categories, please let me know. Thanks! Email me at myeggyournest@gmail.com

Failing at Fertility

I guess I never imagined that the act of procreating another human being could be so difficult. Well, the act itself hasn’t been difficult, rather the actual meeting of the sperm and egg. After all, my mom and my high school health teacher scared me into thinking getting pregnant could happen from a handshake.

So, for years you avoid getting pregnant at the “wrong” time, dutifully taking birth control pills at the same time every day. Checking off all the things you want to do as a couple before having children.

Jack Bauer and I really wanted to enjoy being married for a while before starting a family. We loved to travel all around the world and worked long and hard at our jobs. He got his MBA; I trained for marathons. We even lived abroad for a year (not that these things can’t be done with children, they’re just a little easier without). We had planned everything out pretty specifically. New Zealand trip – check; promotion - check; buy a house – check; save a little bit of a nest egg so that we could have a nest for our eggs – check.

And like so many other couples, when we decided the time was right, it really didn’t occur to us that we would have challenges. After all, all of the women on both sides of my family, including my sister, pretty much got pregnant by looking at their husbands sideways, so I didn’t think anything of it. In fact, my mom was so hyperfertile that she got pregnant with my sister with an IUD in place and my mother-in-law got pregnant with my husband in a similar manner. I just thought JB and I could decide that one day we’d snap our fingers, so to speak, and the next day I’d be pregnant. But, so far, no stork has visited our house.

It just seems so ironic that something you have tried to avoid for so long could actually be completely avoided. We haven’t used birth control in five years and it’s made no difference whatsoever.

One night JB and I were watching TV after one of our many failed artificial attempts to conceive. He seemed to have an epiphany, looking up from his BusinessWeek saying, “You mean we never had to use a condom.” No idea what prompted that thought in his head, but I thought that one moment summed up a lot of this crazy journey.

Is today Father's Day for Jack Bauer?

This morning, our wonderful fertility doctor transferred two beautiful thawed embryos (an 8-cell and a 12-cell) into the Nest’s “playpen,” as he called it. What a fun place – she had it decked out with comfy blankets, toys and snacks. So, now the waiting begins again. Play nice, kiddos.

Earlier this week, I mentioned that it had to be fate that our transfer day is Father’s Day (I barely remember the dates or the months for the three transfers that I went through), doesn’t that give those embies a little extra boost knowing they have a daddy waiting for them? Sure, Jack Bauer has an important role breaking up terrorist cells, advising the President on global security issues and decoding nuclear devices, but he’s also a pretty amazing guy (please don’t get a big head, Jack) with awesome daddy potential.

I think you can tell a lot about how a guy would act as a dad by watching him interact with your pets. Jack makes up funny songs about the dog and cats (usually it’s a Journey or Bon Jovi song with new lyrics), cleans up cat vomit (usually after he found it with his bare foot), beams with pride when the dog learns a new trick or doesn’t eat her own poo, breaks up fights, and pets, plays and loves on them several times a day. If that’s not a daddy waiting to happen, I don’t know who is.

I’d love it if next Father’s Day, I’m in the kitchen trying not to burn the toast and Jack’s sitting on the couch reading the newspaper to our 3-month old twins and 30-month old nonbio baby boy while singing them a song about tooting and burping to the tune of “You Give Love a Bad Name.”

Happy Father’s Day to all dads (especially my own), bio dads and nonbio dads, and hopeful dads.

Jack Bauer Speaks

Hello all, Jack Bauer here. After reading the Factory’s last post, I wanted to chime in based upon her comment that men get all the fun in the quest to babydom.

Now admittedly, we are the weaker sex. I see what the Factory has gone through and I don’t know if I would be able to keep my spirits that high with the constant disappointments. And I can only imagine what those hormone shots do to you. Factory has never gone completely crazy. I admit that there have been times when I thought her kooky actions were because of hormones only to find out she hadn’t been on them for a week. I guess one of the benefits of having a wacky wife is that she you never know if the crazy response is the hormones or just her personality.

Anyway, when I was told what my role was in this whole experience, I realized that I got off pretty easy. Make a sample. Deposit said sample in cup – no worries.

I don’t know really what I expected when I was shown the room to do my business. Maybe some mood lighting? Maybe some Barry White or Luther Vandross in the background? I don’t know. But what I got was the sterile exam room that had a fake leather couch (pleather?) in there with a stack of magazines sitting next to the sink.

Not the most conducive environment for a man to get worked up. Like most guys – when I was 14, it seemed like erections would come every 1 – 2 hours, and of course, right before the teacher called you up to the blackboard to do a math equation. I wonder if my hatred of math stems from this? But there are many things that are harder at 35 than were when I was younger.

But anyway, calling an erection on command – not the easiest thing to do. Plus, as I started to think about this, I wondered how many other men had touched (one handed) those magazines or sat their bare behind on that nasty leather couch. Trust me, getting the erection is one thing – sometimes keeping it is another.

The other thing that went through my mind as I sat there pondering my role – how long should this take? Is this a 15 minute job, 30 minutes, an hour? I didn’t really know. All men have this basic desire to be seen as virile – but with this, I had no frame of reference to what good looks like. If I come out too early will the nurse raise one eyebrow at my fast performance? Or if I take too long will I get the (God forbid) knock on the door to ask if everything is OK?

In retrospect, it is a funny experience that I can laugh about now, but when it happened it was one of the most awkward things I have had to go through.

Superstitious

I’ve been a little bit superstitious since I was a kid. Ever the athlete, I had lucky socks that I would wear for basketball games, lucky underwear (no, not that kind of lucky underwear – I was a kid) that I would wear on the days I had volleyball games or math tests, and a lucky pre-track meet meal of a Pizza Hut personal cheese pizza.

These pseudo-illogical ways disappeared for the most part during college and my twenties. My only momentary lapse was buying a plastic statue of St. Joseph, the patron saint of home and family, and plant him in the ground upside down next to your “for sale” sign. You then say a prayer to him every day for nine days and your house should sell more quickly. So, maybe it’s more religious than superstitious, but you get the idea. Anyway, Jack Bauer and I tried this method to sell our house in Atlanta and it worked.

And then I started trying to get pregnant.

Since I originally thought it would only take a few months, six max, to get pregnant, I started buying cute unisex onesies, décor for the nursery and other baby belongings. We’d buy baby souvenirs while we were on vacation, too.

When I started the hard core fertility treatments, I went into overdrive (maybe it was the fertility drugs), buying even more infant equipment because I was convinced that it would work and I’d soon need Diaper Genies and teething toys.

After three ovulation induction treatments didn’t work and the first IVF didn’t take, I started reverting back to those old superstitious ways, and wondered if buying all the baby stuff was actually inhibiting my ability to get pregnant. So, I went cold turkey and stopped the shopping spree. You would’ve thought I was a heroin addict, I’d get the shakes when I’d pass a Gymboree.

Then we got the call last July about Nate, and those baby buying tendencies picked right back up. My girlfriends almost had an intervention with me after one trip to an Outlet Mall – I tore threw Oshkosh B’gosh and Hartstrings like there was no tomorrow, estimating how big Nate would be when would get to bring him home. Then, as you know from the NonBio Baby post, all progress to get him home stopped.

So I had to go into withdrawal once again. But, I have stuck to my guns and haven’t bought any baby-related stuff for more than a year and a half, except for shower gifts for friends, which is incredibly hard to do.

Here’s hoping that I’ll have trips to Pottery Barn Kids in my near future.

Tired of Being in Limbo

I just got off the phone with my beloved sister. We were chatting about this week’s news about Nate and the Nest’s pending embryo transfer. And how tough it is to wait, even just a couple weeks, for all these potential baby bringing breakthroughs.

I’ve spent an awful lot of time waiting during this whole five-year process. I don’t mean the actual, entire five-year span, though of course, that is a long time, like one-seventh of my life. I mean the waiting for your period to start (in the case of getting ready to start an IVF, IUI or OI cycle) or waiting for your period not to start (in the case that maybe you’re pregnant). One week you’re shooting up fertility drugs waiting for your follicles to mature, and the next week you’re waiting for the conjoined sperm and egg to divide and conquer into as many cells as possible. Then you’re biding time until the transfer date comes up.

The next ten days you’re waiting for the possibility that maybe, just maybe an embryo stuck -- hoping not to feel cramps or bleed, thinking that your boobs are sore from a possible pregnancy and not from the fertility drugs, praying that the mild nauseated feeling is morning sickness.

If things work out, especially if you’ve had fertility challenges, you’re next waiting for the other shoe to drop and not make it though the first trimester. And if that embryo didn’t stick, you’re back to counting the days until you can try again. All the while, waiting, waiting, waiting.

During my IVF and OI cycles, I became obsessed with my calendar, nervously tracking potential start days, counting backwards from my last cycle, pondering if my upcoming business trip would impact me getting my requisite blood work and ultrasound on time, or if I’d have to wait one more month to give it another try.

Once, a few years ago, I even tracked a cycle while I was in a budget planning meeting at work. Hopefully, no one could make sense of my cryptic scribble and I don’t think that blurted out anything like “Trigger shot on day nine” instead of “Bigger presence of the brand on-line.”

Who knows how long before we know whether we can bring Nate home or not? At least there is a not-too-long timeframe for us to know whether the Nest gets pregnant. T-minus seven days and counting until her last ultrasound to check her lining, 11 days until the transfer and 22 days until the Nest’s beta test.

Patience is a virtue and not one I have.

22 eggs, 16 embryos, One Last Chance

In my entry from earlier in the week, I was bragging about my uncanny ability to produce bushels of eggs, but I failed to mention the fact that Jack Bauer’s sperm count is off the charts – he’s got more swimmers than there are in fish in the Atlantic.

How is it possible that the egg factory and super sperm not get pregnant? Mystery to me and my fertility doctor. We seem to be in that oh-so-elite group of 10% of unfruitful couples with unexplained infertility.

So, after the 22 eggs were fertilized, only 16 made it into viable embryos. And, most of these weren’t just any embryos, they were “beautiful embryos” as my fertility doctor called them.

My first IVF transferred two of these beautiful budding babies to no avail. At my second IVF transfer, three were placed, and at my third and final, four were put back in my nest, but for some reason, they didn’t like their home, even though my uterine lining was apparently a sublime environment.

I tried not to take it personally.

So that leaves us with two frozen embryos -- yes, I know my math is wrong. But, five frozen embryos didn’t survive the thawing process.

So, we’re putting all of our eggs (or embryos) in one basket (or The Nest).