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Visiting the birth center- unexpected feelings

11/29/2014

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Emotions, oh my!

Super Uterus had a great idea to visit a new Birthing Center in town to see if it would be a good place for us to have a baby. I have heard of nightmare surrogacy stories (but also good ones!!) where a hospital can leave the intended parents out of the equation a bit. So I thought that this might be a more intimate setting where- the few people who were there, helping deliver the baby, would really know our situation and make it less awkward. 

As it turns out- I made it awkward for everyone anyway!! At least the visit to the birth center anyway. Somehow being introduced as "the mom" totally threw me off. All at once, I had to act like I would actually become a mom one day, but I also had to keep my heart from getting too hopeful; I have had my heart broken too many times before. I couldn't even come up with concerned questions for my hypothetical baby- because I just couldn't even imagine it actually happening despite being there with my gestational carrier. The introductions were followed by a lot of details about labor and birth (obviously)- and all I was thinking about was how I would never be able to experience the things they were talking about. I know there are people who would say that I'm "lucky" not to get fat during pregnancy, or go through the pain and injury of labor. But I can't help thinking how much of a hero one would feel- conquering labor and creating a human. I want to experience all the awkward moments of birthing a baby and I want to tease my husband and say I did something he couldn't.  Going to the birthing center definitely brought up a lot of my emotional struggles with infertility. Clearly- I'm still in the grieving process with never becoming pregnant. 

In the future, I need to do a better job of protecting myself, as a good friend and fellow infertile would say. I no longer attend baby showers, and I can't even hold babies (only in my dreams). That's part of how I keep myself from being sad when I can control it. This time, I was caught off guard at the birthing center visit because I always feel safe talking to Super Uterus about the birth of "our baby". I wasn't expecting to feel emotional at all going to the center with her ( I can just hear my infertile friends laughing at me right now). I talk to Super Uterus all the time about her her children, labors, and pregnancies and I love hearing about them. Somehow I just felt really left out at the birthing center- the way I feel at baby showers or at the lunch table when everyone is trading stories about their kids. It was definitely not how I wanted to feel- but it was nothing that Super Uterus or the midwife said or did. I don't even know that there is a solution for this feeling during the actual labor. Poor Super Uterus had to do all the talking (as usual ;) because I mentally checked out for the duration of the visit. Super Uterus asked all the right questions in the end- and determined it to be a great place to give birth, and she would know, having birthed 3 littles of her own. 

The new Birthing Center is run by Baby & Co. The spiel that we got when we went in (so this has not been independently verified) is that the founder is a Harvard Grad- who wanted to make a "home birth away from home" experience. One where expecting moms are not pressured to induce or have a c-section unless medically necessary; where all your closest family and friends are welcome if you want them there; where your birth plan will be respected. There is some opposition to such places- because in the event of an emergency, the health of the mom and baby would be at risk because you were not at the hospital. This birthing center shares a parking lot with WakeMed Hospital and they can get a mom to surgery for a c-section in under 10 minutes (which is allegedly how fast they can get a mom to surgery who was laboring in the hospital...). I don't know about Super Uterus- but I felt confident that everyone would be okay, even in an emergency. 

As it appears to be on par with a hospital birth with respect to safety- the real draw of the birthing center is the comfortable and luxurious atmosphere. Super Uterus posted pics on her blog review of the birthing center. It looked like a fancy hotel suite to give birth in.... but... there is the fact that no one has actually given birth in one of the suites. They're expecting their first deliveries sometime at the end of this year, I think.  I do wonder how it will look a year from now when we actually need it. Will it still have the same appeal? We shall see... 


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Questions to ask a potential carrier...

11/18/2014

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Big Fish, Super Uterus, The Manager, and The Phoenix

A friend asked me what I asked Super Uterus before I decided that she was "the one". Really that was not how it happened. Super Uterus was WAY more researched than I was- and practically interviewed me. She asked a lot of good questions and brought up really good topics to discuss. All of this certainly didn't get discussed on our first coffee date. Some we chatted about online before we met, others we talked about after. Here are some of the highlights (and ARE NOT organized in order of importance). 

What do you want the contact to be like after the baby is born? 

Will we (mom and hubby) be able to see the birth and participate? 

How much contact will we have during the pregnancy? what kind of contact? 

If you have to go in for a c-section or emergency surgery for the birth of the baby, who will you chose to go in the OR with you?

What does your partner think about having to take care of you when you are pregnant and after you have given birth (physically and emotionally)?

Do you vaccinate? Are your kids vaccinated?

Do you take any drugs? prescriptions?

How much do you go out and drink?

Will you drink coffee or alcohol while preg? even a little?

How much or how hard will you exercise?

Will you limit your travel when you are far along?

What are your feelings about disclosing your surrogacy on social media and are there privacy concerns?

Can I see your insurance explanation of benefits- (cntl F “surro” you will find any clauses against surrogacy or surrogate)  It’s a can of worms- and by far the worry worthiest part of surrogacy.

What if the baby has serious health problems- and the intended parents wanted to terminate the pregnancy?

How many embryos would you allow us to transfer at once? Would you carry multiples?

If she is working- how do they handle maternity if she isn’t having her own baby? She should consider the effects on her career. Will she have to use vacation time instead of maternity leave?

Talk to her about her support system- who can she talk to about all this- it’s really a lot to handle. Super Uterus is a twin and she’s close to her sister and also has a ton of friends and a great family.

Does she say things like “your baby” a lot- I like how Super Uterus is always saying this to me. I have no thought that she won’t give us the baby- because the whole time- even before it’s conceived- it has been ours.

What is her biggest fear about surrogacy? Big Fish (hubby of Super Uterus) was afraid that the intended parents would change their mind and not want the baby!! and that they would have to care for it! We are really a perfect match because we had the opposite fear that they would not want give us the baby!

Your surro's partner - if she has one- has to be part of the entire contract. He also has to get medical, pysch, and legal. This is time he also has to take off work. Is he willing to do that? 

MORE TIPS. 
This is from another extraordinary uterus- a mother from surrogacy- who lives in close to us... We reach out to her a lot for her experiences and she has been extremely helpful and open about her surrogacy experience. Here are some things she told me to think about before I had coffee with Super Uterus. 

1) politics/religious beliefs. 

2) working moms. 

3) health issues with the baby. 

4) has she been a surrogate before. 


I hope you have found these topics helpful for your journey!! Please share your experiences talking through these questions with your carrier!! 

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What's next?

11/13/2014

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 the short version

1.     Be infertile.

2.     Fail fertility treatments (tears)..

3.     Find your very own Super Uterus (sorry, mine’s taken).

4.     Medical eval- all y’all- that means intended parents, carrier and carrier's partner! STD tests, and more for the carrier!

5.     Get psych eval- all ya'll again!

6.     Lawyer up! Contract time

7.     Egg retrieval and transfer!!!

8.     Dreaded two week wait (2ww) for a pregnancy check

9.     Tears (happy or sad).

If sad tears, go back to step 7 and repeat.

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Ready for probing!! 

A lot of people are interested in knowing the plan going forward.

We have the next step scheduled, which is to have Super Uterus get checked to make sure she is healthy and ready to carry a baby. All parties (Me, The Manager, Super Uterus and Big Fish) will get blood tests. This is to ensure that an embryo transfer to Super Uterus doesn’t give her a germ- and that Super Uterus and Big Fish don’t have anything that can hurt the baby in utero. Allegedly, “there is no evidence” of an embryo transfer resulting in the spread of a disease (so says Dr. P), it’s required by the FDA because it is technically a tissue transfer.

After that, all Super Heroes will report to a psychologist to see if everyone is mentally healthy enough to handle the emotional roller coaster of surrogacy. Here is a publication by the ASRM that gives an overview of what psychologists should go over with everyone.  Here are some interesting ones to think about for each party.



For the Intended Parents

·       Potential guilt reaction of gestational carrier associated with failed attempts or problem that may arise

·       Understanding the gestational carrier's right to make choices for her body over the rights of the intended parents

·       Possibility of abortion in the event of an abnormal fetus

·       Gestational carrier's behavior during pregnancy and methods for resolving conflicts (e.g., eating habits, prescription drugs, alcohol)

·       Rights of the gestational carrier to refuse or to accept medical interventions or testing

·       Understanding the gestational carrier's right to make choices for her body over the rights of the intended parents

For the Super Uterus

·       Ability to separate from and relinquish the child

·       Feelings about multiple pregnancy, bed rest, hospitalization, and pregnancy loss

·       Feelings and decisions about termination of pregnancy, multifetal pregnancy reduction, amniocentesis, chorionic villi sampling, and other prenatal diagnostic testing

·       Reactions to the possibility of becoming infertile as a result of the process



If we all pass medical and psych, then we will draw up a contract based on all possible outcomes of a surrogacy- if the Super Uterus carries twins, if she miscarries, if she has to have a c-section, etc. Then it’s egg retrieval for me, and soon after transfer time for Super Uterus. We are planning for that to happen in January 2015. We will fill you in on more details as we actually go through these steps.


Thanks again all for following our story and sending us love and support. 


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“Indy vs. Agency” as Super Uterus would say…

11/11/2014

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When I first started down the surrogacy path, I thought that I would have to use an agency. First- I didn’t know where to even start- and an agency would know what to expect and would be ready to handle anything. I wish there was an agency for IVF- because I totally would have used that to navigate fertility treatments my first time. Second, I didn’t even have a carrier- and where was I going to find one on my own?

But the more I looked into an agency, the more the costs just spiraled out of control. The cost of a carrier, reproductive technologies, legal fees etc. was already going to break the bank and an agency, in my eyes, would just charge (A TON) extra just to get you organized. As a type-A person, I knew I was going have my ~ish organized anyway, plus, I navigated the hairy world of fertility treatments without an agency, so I thought I could do it. Talk to me next year when- dear Lord help us- when we have a baby with the help of Super Uterus. Maybe I will be sending you all to an agency, but probably not.

So here are some details that I would want someone to tell me about the process of having a child by gestational carrier without an agency:

FOUR WORRY WORTHY CATAGORIES.

1.    
Medical - medical clearance testing, getting eggs, transferring. (Worry- will I even have embryos to transfer???)

2.    
Psychological clearance- evaluations for me, hubby, carrier, and carrier's sig. fig.  (Worry- will they “allow” us to be parents this way? Imagine if all parents had to get psychologically tested before they could have children….)

3.    
Carrier costs- she’s really doing most of the work, and taking care of your baby for 9 months. Includes compensation and expenses related to being pregnant. (worry- will she really give us the baby?? and that’s why the match and trust with your carrier is soooooo important.)

4.    
Legal- makes the contracts and deals with the courts so that you can adopt your own baby, or do a pre-birth order. (Worry- does this piece of paper they give us mean anything in the state of NC??)

I'll go into more details about these categories and the individual costs in later posts- in real time, while we experience them. Hopefully by the end of my journey with Super Uterus, our blogs and site, The League of Extraordinary Uteri, will be a resource for future intended parents and surrogates looking for what to expect.

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Why we are only transferring one embryo.

11/9/2014

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If you'd asked me last year how many embryos I wanted transferred, I would have said two. But now I'm a veteran IVFer and my view on this subject has definitely changed. 
By the time an infertile is trying IVF- they're desperate for children and my judgement was definitely clouded by that- and all the money that we would have to pay for each lottery ticket to get pregnant. The rationale is that if you put two in, there are greater odds that at least one will "stick", as we infertiles like to say. And hey, who doesn't like a good Buy One Get One Free??  But studies show that there is very little difference in pregnancy rates when you transfer one or two. The difference is the rate of having multiples.  With a 2 embryo transfer, your odds of having multiples increases by a ton! Multiples- like twins and triplets- lead to greater health risks for pregnant women and for the babies themselves. No infertile likes the Reproductive Endocrinologist's mantra- but the goal is "one healthy baby" (** and one healthy mama). 
A solution to many infertiles' reluctance to transfer one embryo is insurance coverage for fertility treatments, including IVF. If we didn't have to finance the overwhelming cost of fertility treatments- we would be more accepting if it didn't work the first time. Fewer multiples births would actually decrease health insurance costs for everyone- and that is a product of insurance coverage of IVF.  <<more on insurance coverages in future posts>>
I'm experiencing particular distress because of my own decision to transfer two embryos in the past. With our previous IVF cycle, we had 5 mature embryos, and all 5 fertilized (IVF/ICSI split for ya'll who are in the know). We had good looking embryos- all dividing well with very little fragmentation. We begged our physician to transfer 2 in both a fresh and a frozen cycle. Well- neither of those worked- and here we are with only one frosty left. As I mentioned before, the odds were- if it was going to stick- we would have been pregnant whether we put one or two in. I wish I wasn't so focused on how much money it would cost us to try IVF again, because if we had transferred only 1 each time, we would have three left to transfer (one by one) to our healthy Super Uterus surrogate. Not to mention, doing another IVF to bank embryos carries its own risks with injecting large amounts of hormones and undergoing egg-retrieval surgery. 
Super Uterus actually got me thinking about number of embryos to transfer. She is actually a twin herself! She has a great perspective on the issue and will only allow single embryo transfer as a surrogate. Hop over to her recent Part-time Uterus post for her thoughts on embryo transfer. 


    What do you think about embryo transfer number? 

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Needy uterus

11/8/2014

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I never thought that I would have trouble getting pregnant. At first we had fun "trying".... but after a few months without success, the scientist in me came out- I began tracking daily temperature, monitoring my LH levels, plotting my cycle length, and describing my cervical mucus. <<yuck. I know. But everything seemed very regular and perfectly cyclic. I went to my regular OB, who told to me just keep trying. Luckily, she still referred me to a Reproductive endocrinologist. Blood tests came back mostly normal- except for AMH- indicative of low egg reserve. Long story short- fertility treatments failed for this uterus. Me and my significant other, The Manager, are now looking for a uterus to rent. Thankfully, we found Super Uterus- a hero who is helping us have our baby.  I relied on many internet friends and resources to navigate my early days of infertility. In this blog- I hope to share with you my story of infertility, advocacy and surrogacy.

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