The Sisterhood

Ferris Bueller:  You want to get married?

Sloane:  Sure.

F:  Today? I'm serious.

S:  I'm not getting married!

F:  Why not?

S:  What do you mean, "Why not?" Think about it.

F:  Well, no, besides being too young, having no place to live, you feeling a little awkward about being the only cheerleader with a husband, give me one good reason why not.                                                

It can be pretty lonely pursuing dreams outside of mainstream. Believe me, I know.  Most everything significant I have experienced was to the beat of my own drum with a quirky twist. 

Honestly, it's not as if being different didn't phase me. Every step, down whatever path, I had been hyper-conscious of the process and the outcome.   No, there was not just a handful of things over my lifetime. The tally was more like counting all of my fingers and toes.... and all my husband's fingers and toes... my son's... maybe borrowing a few fingers from one of my daughters.... 

The number of unusual life experiences is up there, that's for sure.  The loneliness was relentless when family or friends didn't understand or support me.  I'm sure they were all scratching their heads and asking themselves "why" I chose living life on the fringe.  In hindsight, rather I see it as "why not?" 

Once I realized what consisted of the predictable life, I got bored. When I wasn't waiting for another adventure to find me, I poked around curiously seeking the unique.  No, not in reckless venture, but more of the notion that it would broaden my world and allow me to express who I am.

So who am I?  That's a question alright!  Born big city in the 70's, I got to do many fun kid things just because the opportunity was there. My mother took me on trips to the county zoo and the museum.  Then there was ice skating in the neighborhood or speed-boating at the lake with aunts, uncles, grandma and grandpa. Despite being one of the poorer families, the experiences abounded. 

           

Almost 2000 miles to experience culture shock. Now if you put me in a town with more than one traffic signal I get confused.

Then life changed around age six and we moved across country to small town. How small? Well, let's just say it was the first time I'd seen homes on dirt roads and the neighbors' houses were more than an arm stretch away. Innocently I asked my mom where the sidewalks were.

And the people were different. Isolated, clannish different. This new community was not used to open minded people like our family. The adjustment to a bridled, remote lifestyle was not easy.

Home town. Probably one of the few families that was not related to someone else in the community. 

We did get a traffic signal but not until my late teen years.

....Nor did it stick.

One week after I graduated from high school I married- and despite rumors, I was not pregnant. Within two years I graduated from a normally 3-4 year nursing program. I then lived the very constrained, legalistic Christian wife life. After 8 years I couldn't be bottled up any more, so that marriage ended.  

Rather than be easier, life got harder, and emotional nurturance was very infrequent. However, I rebuilt my life with very little help from my "support system". Against adversity, I was able experience the new, different and unusual once again.  I put my all into remaking myself-  "nobody puts Baby in a corner."  I didn't get to live quite the same elegant lifestyle, but like Baby, I became who I wanted to be.

My junior year I was told by everybody that I looked like "the girl from Dirty Dancing".  Who the heck...?!?
I eventually found out 

Flash forward through many more adventures to today. My journey odyssey has brought me to try to have another child through IVF and surrogacy.

Pursuing assisted reproductive technology (ART) is much of an emprise. So many circumstances make so that infertility (primary and secondary), IVF and other treatments are generally out of the daily spotlight. That is, unless you're rich and famous. It's about as awkward as talking about birth control with your kids or hush hush as a menstrual cycle.  Neither should be- ask my kids. Anything reproductive including IVF is normal conversation at home.  Heck, my preteen daughter can tell you the qualities of good sperm versus bad sperm morphology 😉  We simply look at it as a different way of living life with the same results.

Regardless, it's lonely.  Isolated is more precise. Friends or close acquaintances either can't relate, or point blank don't want to take the time understand what is going on in my life. I can't blame them. Most of them are working on sending their kiddos off to high school or even college. They've emptied their attics and garages of anything that is fuzzy, squeaks or giggles, giving it to charity or to their fur babies. 

Family is a little better, they lend an ear- especially my sister Kate who gets more than her share of details because she is such a good listener. However with the rest of my family, the process of waiting for everything to come together and the details involved (which are "milestones" to me) causes it to escape their interest. 

It's not like I'm pregnant and friends and family can rub my belly, watching the monthly progression. I'm sure they're too anxious to ask what's the latest. In a sense likened to asking someone who's been trying, "are you pregnant yet?", but finding they failed repeatedly.  

There exist those that are still clueless about it all (tactless perhaps?) and launch an inquiry.  Minutes after introduced to a lady-old-enough-to-know-better last summer, she literally rubbed my belly with two hands then asked me my due date.  The "bump" she commented on was actually pudginess from stress eating.   I managed to hide my hurt for her sake and not fume at the same time. The blouse I wore that day was hastily retired from my wardrobe.

Where I ended up after the support dissipated was to be inside my head to ponder, to process. A very desolate place.  Sometimes Me, Myself and I failed to be friendly, they instigated distrust, provoked unfounded fears and whispered words like "failure" and "never". 

Fortunately for social media, I have the opportunity to connect with others on various groups exploring the assistance of ART.  Over 40?  There's a group for that!  Low AMH?  Ditto. Women seeking treatment in Mexico. Yep.  Support for mothers that need a surrogate to carry?  Uh-huh.  I'm connected alright!

Call it a sisterhood. Women just like me, age, similar medical challenges trying to conceive and with successful results, and some not.  All of them providing support and sage advice.  

• There to cheer for the small successes- "My AMH went up!!!"  That is grounds for celebration, the least a fresh mojito and ceviche.  
• Encouragement during the challenges- "My cycle protocol has this, *this* and *this* medication. What the heck are they???". Thank heavens for the gals in Europe because they were most familiar with them.
• Always willing to send a virtual hug- "My prolactin is high, I need to take a medication to counteract it but it has nasty side effects."  I can say that wasn't new territory because there was more than one lady in these groups  that already had this experience.

The highs and lows- from hearing the first heart beat, or of a 14 week miscarriage. They have been through it all, a wealth of information and the mentoring that I was unable to get from those closest to me.

Louise Brown, the first baby in the world born via IVF signing my copy of her book.  Talk about support! 💜💜💜

I have one more week to go before I am poked by a bazillion injections, hopefully to get that one egg that will bring new life to our family.  I would not have made it this far, sane, had it not been from the women in the sisterhood. 

Family had been great,  but now they have the relief to not feel obligated to hold me up through this emotional journey odyssey. Instead,  we can enjoy each day together focusing on us.

Through all that has passed, with what I'm  living, and thinking ahead of that which is to come, I will always be sure of one thing: 
Life is too short to live the same day twice.

Then and Now: Fertility Medicine- You've Come A Long Way Baby

Test tube baby. 

I was six and a half years old when the term was coined for the first baby in the world conceived and born through IVF. The term stuck in my head since I'd heard it from the news casts in 1978. That, and the name Louise Brown. Little did I know, I would be experiencing a similar journey first hand. 

July 27, 1978

Louise was the first child in the world to be conceived via in-vitro fertilization in 1977 in England. Though she was dubbed a "test tube baby", the science involved in the process actually involved a petri dish and a blown glass bubble that incubated her as an embryo. She was born in July, 1978, her conception and ultimate birth possible from the science and medical technology developed by two Englishmen: biologist Dr. Robert Edwards, and gynecologist and surgeon Dr. Patrick Steptoe. 

Louise and the glass womb that incubated her first few days life

Despite the scientific and medical miracle, I still couldn't get over that her parents named her Louise.  It was such a bland and grown up name in my 6-year-old mind for a newborn that just made history. Why not a name like Joann or Angela? Those were popular names of the pretty girls I grew up with in the 70's. It's gotta be because she was British.  In my child-like mind I was hoping when she got older that she wouldn't get teased. 

The science behind conception outside of the womb was in it's infancy in 1969 when Dr. Edwards was fertilizing human eggs ("ova") in petri dishes. What he couldn't do was get the zygote to divide and grow properly and become an embryo. By 1970, he was joined by Dr. Steptoe and with success expanded research to involved human volunteers. They were women and their husbands that had issues of some sort with fertility. The doctors' research was based on retrieving their volunteers' eggs, fertilize them in-vitro ("in glass"), and implant  them in the mothers' uteri in hopes to overcome infertility. 

Yes, you are correct to think that this was very controversial in more ways than the obvious. If you want, you can read more about that here. 

Needless to say, the research resulted in more failures than successes. Even up until Spring of 1976, they had failed to maintain a pregnancy more than five weeks.  Just months later in the Fall of 1976, Louise's mother Lesley Brown was referred to the doctors by recommendation of her own physician for failure to conceive.

Lesley had blocked fallopian tubes which meant once she ovulated, her egg entered the tube but had no chance to meet with her husband John's sperm.  In one interview it was said Lesley was desperate to do anything to have a baby. Desperate enough for someone to use unproven scientific and medical techniques to help make the hookup happen.  Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe were her seemingly only hope.

The doctors were only able to maintain a total of three pregnancies, the longest for five weeks. Five weeks out of 38-42 needed to grow a baby. Only three positive pregnancies resulted from several attempts to implant embryos back to their perspective mothers.  Three women conceived and all three failed to come to term.  Lesley was trusting these men to help her conceive the baby that she's been trying for the past 9 years.  To help her keep her baby growing for 40 weeks? 

Hookups were easy-peasy for the docs. The part of the story that Lesley literally did not know about was their inability to get everything to chill and have the eggs make themselves at home. It was something they had never been able to do until they met her.  

Interesting enough, as said by Louise herself in this interview in October 2016 with Valerie Landis of Eggsperience, her mother's strong belief she was going to have the baby may have been enough to make the pregnancy progress. She had hope. The rest is now history.  

Proud parents Lesley and John Brown with baby Louise 

Currently there are an estimated 5 million+ babies worldwide that have been born via IVF since Louise was born in 1978, including her sister in 1982 and the first American IVF baby Elizabeth Carr in 1981. Most of these babies are born to parents that have mechanical obstacles to overcome. Some are because one or both in the partnership are infertile and need medicine to increase production of eggs or sperm.

Then there's me. No uterus, no problem. Just rent a womb. It's the egg production and  fetching that is going to be the challenge. We're looking at overcoming odds in territory that is often explored and challenged but has high failure rates. It's called advanced maternal age. 

As of current, results of the many of diagnostic tests I've gone through in the past couple of months, my female reproductive organs aren't doing too shabby when it comes to hormone, follicle and egg production. Heck, I wouldn't expect any less considering I was almost 31 with my last birth and got pregnant waaaaaay too easily. My paternal grandmother (by chance Louise was her middle name) had 9 pregnancies, the last at age 34. But the most fertile of them all, my maternal grandmother (middle name Wilhemina if you are wondering), was pregnant 18, maybe 19 times, the last born at age 42. 

To proceed with egg retrieval with Lesley Brown, the doctors followed her actual cycle and harvested one egg from her ovary.  The one egg that a woman normally for each cycle, two if the ovaries are wanting to be competitive. The doctors had one chance to do this right. 

Sounds a poorly laid out plan- just one egg- for a couple of docs that were diligent for years to get this right.  It's like packing one pair of underwear for a week's vacation (men!).  But they had tried for a few years to use stimulation techniques on their volunteers to mature more than one egg at a time, and succeeded in getting 4-6 eggs. However, the medications used to increase egg production sped up cycles in the uterus to already be at the sloughing phase (menstruation) by the time the egg matured enough to implant. The egg growth and uterine cycle were out of sync and the uterus could not support the egg.  This was not a workable plan in order for Lesley to conceive and bear a child. 

Obviously Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe got it right because we have Louise as proof, but it was a big gamble at that day and age, as it would be now. 

Today, during IVF procedures, they are able to stimulate both ovaries to produce 5, 10, 20, even 25 eggs at a time. And they can keep the uterus, should there be one, in proper hormonal sync for embryo transfer. The challenge after retrieving sufficient quantity is to assess for quality eggs. 

Just as you have a blackberry bush laden with berries, there will be some berries that are ripe, some not. Some that are big and tasty, and some are small and barely palatable. Then consider if the bush has been around for several years, endured a few sprays of Round-up as well as machete hackings to cut them back. You're going to find a good bit of the berries that resemble squinty-eyed mutants but there is the chance that there will be a few good ones. 

Human ovaries eggs are not much different, especially when you are asking them to do something they weren't programmed. My ovaries are along the lines of that blackberry bush that has age and environmental factors working against it.  Let's not say menopause because I'm not there yet believe it or not, but things are slowing down despite a family history of super-fertility being on my side.

The plan this July is to give my ovaries a challenge of a lifetime with stimulation medications (um, injections) to see that if amongst those squinty-eyed mutants we'll find a good 5+ eggs that will pass inspection, selecting the best of the best to be transferred into my loving surrogate. 

Birth Control, Methyfolate,Omega 3's, DHEA, CoQ10, Prenatal, Aspirin, Vitamin D3,
Hawaiin  bioastin astaxanthin, Zinc, Iron, Methylated B12- all ordered by the fertility specialist

Until then, my life revolves around taking 21 pills a day. One of those pills is birth control, believe it or not, to stabilize my hormones to a controlled baseline. The other 20 are split doses from 14 various vitamins, minerals, supplements and thyroid medications. Several have antioxidant effects, some strengthen the eggs, while others help the eggs rejuvenate to their young selves, and the hope that one or two will lay the ground work to increase overall production in the ovaries. 

With all the negatives, you're asking if this seriously can be done. Yes it can. Because I believe. I believe in my team of doctors and embryologist. I believe in me, my strength, my health and drive that God gave me.  I also know that He has granted each one of these providers their talents to make this happen. 

And for Louise.... I think I was creating a double standard. After all, Sinthea isn't really a good baby name either. Like me, she grew into her name and is awfully good at living up to who she was meant to be. 

Nobody’s Fool; a Story about Love

Posted on April Fool's Day, there were some skeptics. Who could blame them?

I enjoy a good joke. I love to tell them to see everyone laugh. It was April Fool's Day after all. It was a chance for a cleverly executed prank with great timing. Bummer is, I often falter on the delivery of the punch line. April Fool's Day was no different. 

Yes, what you see is a real ultrasound. Yes, the clinic spelled their name wrong. Yes, it belongs to me, but not of what your mind may have lead you to believe. What you see in the photo is my left ovary, and for your viewing pleasure, I can share scans of my right. 

Both Left and Right.... the right one is the overachiever this month

Sure, some of you may have thought they had a view to my womb, and any self-respecting mommy could justify it by imagining the dark circle amidst the static-like surrounds as an implanted embryo of 4 weeks within it's protective sack. However, what you actually saw in that view was one of two ovarian follicles, the larger somewhere around the size of 6mm- 1/4 inch. 

Who could blame you had you thought that it was the previous?  Most anyone can agree that what you see on ultrasound takes a stretch of imagination to discern anything.  Lucky for me, my ultrasound tech knew what I needed to see during the exam and gave me a guided tour. 

So why the snapshots of my interior gonads you ask?  Why get everyone worked up in a dither for hours on end? Before you flog me, I have a reason, and no, it's not just to orchestrate a well timed April Fool's prank. Those of us with younger kids are about over it by 11am the day of. 

We're counting follicles. Ladies, have you counted your follicles lately?  -Probably no need. For me, it is a necessity. Each follicle has the potential on it's own to ripen a single egg. With a bit of special medical attention, I could achieve a couple eggs per follicle. In my case (say "40-something"), I plan on taking advantage of every intervention possible to increase follicle count and egg yield. 

The truth be known, my husband and I are *expecting* to bring our first little one into the world with the understanding the pregnancy will be of somewhat prolonged duration. Ummmmmm, Like 12 to 15 months prolonged. We all have wondered about the world famous, chronically-in-labor April the Graffe from New York? Yep, like her. Thank heavens it won't be a pregancy like an elephant!  - Go ahead, Google that one! 😉

Tired? I think she looks like she is exhausted! A giraffe is pregnant for 13-15 months
Photo from WDIV ClickOnDetroit

Needless to say, I'm not going to complain because I'm not the one that has to be the literal burden of such a long gestation and unpredictable due date (EDC for my nurse friends). Luckily no human has to either. The prolonged duration will be due to the process of getting pregnant. So yea, 12-15 months, then a baby. We are expecting to be expecting.  It's making me feel a little sorry for April because she actually has to live it. 

I know, like seriously Sinthea....... What's the deal?

It's really, really, really true. My husband, David, and I are going to have a baby together through Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), or IVF, aka "test tube baby". Or at least we are going to try.

Try is the operative word. This is HUGE - scratch that word. I mean, it's a G-R-A-N-D endeavor. There are a billion variables that can work against our favor. Just 1,000 of those stem from the average monthly loss of eggs from a woman's ovarian reserves. Plus, in my case, the absence of a uterus. 1,001 variables.  This alone leads us to rent a womb. 

Yep, you heard me. So have many of my dear friends and family heard me shamelessly pose to them over the past year or so if I could borrow their vacant womb to nestle an embryo or two. I had a couple of loving offers but it wasn't to be. 

I did stick my neck out and place ads on a couple (ok, a few) surrogacy websites, and make contact through chance encounters which I received two very sincere offers.  The first retracted because she and her husband decided to have their own precious bundle- but great for her, right? She finally can carry a baby for herself once again! With the second gal, we were very close to pulling together a solid plan - and might I say, it's not easy when it's two sets of state laws that have to be considered. However, her father was diagnosed once again with the "c" word. She definitely needed to focus her care and support on him. And when the timing is right, she's going to make one heck of an amazing surrogate.

How then will we do this? Stay tuned. I've decided to be brave and share with those of you hat are interested about our journey. I would love the support because there are going to many big hills that we'll have to climb along the way. If you are one of those that doesn't have anything positive to offer, just keep scrolling and read elsewhere, you won't miss anything but a bit of my babble. 

Mostly, we are thankful for each one of you and your show of encouragement. This was not an exercise in who's the "April Fool", but rather a way to show unconditional friendship and love.