Unexpected Blessing

I received a HUGE unexpected blessing last night.

I was chatting with a friend on FB while watching a movie at home and eating a slice of peach tart when she asked me for my email address and then asked me to check my email.  I received an email from a hotel with a confirmation for a hotel reservation.  I was like, what's this?

My friend, bless her heart, had sneakily booked us a hotel room for our stay in Knoxville!  She is giving us our entire 4 nights of hotel stay for FREE using her credit card points!

Eeeekkk!! We were just talking over lunch about how I needed to book my hotel and car rental yet, and how the price of the hotel we used to stay in had for some reason gone up a lot.  I was contemplating staying at a cheaper hotel that we had never been in, but was a little nervous about.  I was telling her I may just suck it up and pay more for a nicer and more established hotel.  This hotel that we are booked in is really nice, and costs $160 a night, way beyond our budget for a hotel room.

When I looked back at our FB conversation, I see that she had been sneaky, asking me a few questions about where I was looking to book, etc.  I am so grateful for her generosity.  She said it didn't cost her anything but her credit card points, though she could use it for other stuff for herself.   She said it was a pleasure for her to help me out, so I didn't have to not worry about money and, I could, quoting her, ".... relax n enjoy n get pregnant dammit"!  I thought that was pretty hilarious.

I am so grateful to her for this generous gift.  She is a blessing to me.

Today, I finally booked our rental car.  We are renting from Enterprise car rental, another first for us.  Wow, this trip is full of firsts and new experiences.  I hope that is a good sign for our transfer as well.

On another note, today I increased my Es.trace dosage to one tablet, twice a day, an increase from only half a tablet twice a day.  Also today, I was just sitting here surfing on FB when BAM! Holy hot flashes!  Out of nowhere came this hot flash.  I have never experienced anything like that.  For a bit there I thought something was wrong with me, and then I thought oh that's right, I'm on Lu.pron.  Usually the only times I have ever felt any hot flashes was in bed at night.  This was a first and hopefully not too many more.

On Sunday I had received an email from Debbie, the counselor/mediator that works with NEDC donor families.  She passed on a note from my donor family that they are excited to hear about my May transfer date.  They wish us the best of luck, and are thinking of us often.  It's alway really nice to hear from the donor families.  They sound like a great family and are very open to having communication with us, even now, before our transfer.  We have decided that we will wait until there is a successful pregnancy before communicating directly with them, and are understand our decision.

17 days to transfer!

Our New Donor Family

On Monday, we found out that our new donor family accepted our match.

On the same day, we found out that Debbie had already reached out to the donor couple to start communications to start working on our Open Donation Agreement (ODA).

On Tuesday, we put our check for the ODA in the mail to Debbie.  Found out she was speaking with them the next day .

On Wednesday, I spent about an hour on the phone Debbie finding out more about the donor family.  I'm excited about this donor family.  This couple has 3 children, a little 2 year old boy and a set of boy/girl twins.  I'm happy to find out that this family has very similar background with us in terms of occupation, education and family values.  Seems like we also desire the same level of openness.

On Friday, we received a draft copy of the ODA between us and our new donor family.  We reviewed it over the weekend.  It is very similar to what we had with one of our previous donors, so we are pretty comfortable with it.

Today, we OK'd the ODA with Debbie.  I'm assuming we will be receiving a copy of the ODA to be notarized fairly soon this week, unless the donor family has questions or need come changes to the ODA.

Things are moving along nicely.

Match Accepted

This morning, I received an email that the donor family we requested on Friday has accepted our match!

Yay!  Now, to proceed with next steps.  We are putting the check in the mail tomorrow for our Open Donation Agreement (ODA) in the mail.  Debbie, the counselor at NEDC will contact the family to start communication with the donor family and will start our process of negotiating our ODA.

It feels nice to make some progress.  Please pray that the process will go smoothly, and we will be able to have transfer in May.

Donor Family Match Requested

**If you would still like to take part in my $10 Starbucks gift card giveaway in honor of my 200th follower, please do so by commenting in the last post here.  You have till 11:59 pm CST Saturday, March 8th to do so.**


This morning, I finally emailed NEDC's coordinator to be matched with a family.

This has been THE HARDEST decision Babe and I have had to make in our embryo adoption journey.

After receiving donor profiles of Caucasian families last week, we narrowed those down to 2 families.  We requested information about the embryos from these families, which we received on Wednesday.

After reviewing all the profiles, we narrowed our choices to our top 3 families.  One was Caucasian, one Asian, and one bi-racial.  This was the toughest part.  Do we want to pick a family where the children looked like me, or like Babe, or a of both?  For me, it is a tough decision to have to pick the race of your child.  Ideally, we want children that would look like the both of us.  However, if you think about it, in many cases, you don't usually get to pick the race of your child in traditional adoption either.  So we decided we would not let race be such a big part of our decision (though I have to admit it was tough!).

We want to pick a family with the highest chance of a successful pregnancy.  Since this is our third transfer at NEDC, we would be out of the program at NEDC if we are not successful this time.  So, we are looking for a family with excellent quality embryos, but also with a young genetic mother, as recommended by Dr. Keenan.  But none of these families had both.

I emailed the embryologist asking what has a higher chance of a successful pregnancy, embryos from a younger genetic mother, or embryos with higher quality grading.  In her opinion, embryos from a younger genetic mother is more likely to give me a higher chance of pregnancy than higher grade embryos.

So, after even more consideration, we have decided to go with a family with the younger genetic mother.  This morning we sent a request to be matched with this donor family.  Hopefully, this will give the family the weekend to review our profile and make a decision to either accept or decline us.

I'm relieved that this part of the decision is made.  I'm praying that the donor family makes a decision quickly so we can proceed with the next steps of our transfer.

No Real Update on New Donor Family

There is no real update on our selection of our new donor family.

We went through the profiles again of donor families we already have on hand.  I had some questions about a few of the donor families, and the coordinator contacted the families for additional information, but have not had much response from the families.  This kind of worries me a little.

So far, we have narrowed down our choices based on medical history, age of the genetic mother, age of the genetic father, and number of embryos available.  That left us with just a couple that we that we are interested in.

Last week, I requested information about the embryos from both the families.  Carol the embryologist emailed me back on Friday with some information.  One family has much better quality embryos than the other.  So, we are seriously considering this family but we also want to look at a few more as a back up, in case the family declines our match.

On Monday, I requested additional profiles of families with Caucasian embryos.  I hope the hear back from the coordinator by today or tomorrow.

This process has been a lot harder than the first time around.  Babe and I picked the same two families separately.  They were the ideal families for us.  But now, we have to pick a new family and there are so many other things to consider.  It's sad that our first 2 "ideal" families did not work result in a successful pregnancy.

I hope we can make some progress here by the end of this week, or at least by early next week.

February 2014 ICLW

Ooppss.... we are more than halfway through ICLW of February!  Happy ICLW!  Sorry for the late post.

If you are visiting for the first time, or have not been here in a while, here's a quick catch up on where I am right now.  At the end of January, Babe and I had our second frozen embryo transfer (FET) of our adopted embryos.  We worked with the National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC) and flew to Knoxville, TN for our transfer.  We transferred 3 blastocysts (day 5 embryos).  You can read about our transfer here.

We were over the moon when we found out during our first beta that we were not only pregnant, but with a pretty high beta number of 159.  However, we were shocked and devastated to find out at our second beta that our number had dropped to only 44, and again to 20 at our third beta.  We were having another chemical pregnancy.  We had our first chemical pregnancy at our first transfer in January.

We have had 2 chemical pregnancies so far, and we plan to go back to NEDC in May for another transfer.  We are currently in the process of matching with another donor family.  We hope to complete this process in the next couple of weeks.

I'd love for you to join me on our (long) journey to parenthood.

Post Transfer Consult

This last few days has been pretty tough.  To add insult to injury, the night of my 3rd beta, my nose started running, and I have been down with a cold.

Thank you for the many kind comments here and from those on FB as well as texts from friends.  I've had a ton on thoughts running through my head, trying to process this and next steps.  But that will have to wait for a later post.

On Thursday, I had my post transfer consult with Dr. Keenan.  He actually called me earlier than our scheduled appointment time because he had some free time.  Since I was available, I spoke with him then.  In the end, he ran out of time to answer all my questions. 

This phone consult wasn't that much different from my first one from my November transfer.

• Though not as great as my last transfer, embryos were good at 3AA, 2AB and 2BC (though 2BC was not expected to survive).  The embryos were not an issue.
• The transfer went fine without any problems and my lining was good.
• There was nothing after the transfer that would have cause this not to work.  I wasn't sick and was pretty relaxed.  
• There was no reason why this transfer wouldn't have worked again.  
• There is no reason medically why we can't try again.  It would be up to Babe and I if we are emotionally ready or want to try again. 
• I asked about his thoughts about how my first beta was so high and it dropping after that, and he didn't know why that would happen either.
• I said, based on my research, though no one really know for sure why it happens, chemical pregnancies are usually due to abnormalities in the chromosomes of the developing embryos.  I asked him if he thought this was true in our case since we have had embryos from two different set of donors so far.  He said it is usually true, but we can never be sure since they cannot test the embryos for abnormalities at transfer time.
• I also asked for clarification about the quality of the embryo at transfer time (4AA, 6AA, etc), is that any way tied to abnormalities in the chromosomes of the embryo, and he said no.  He cannot tell if there are any abnormalities in the chromosomes in the embryos unless they were specifically tested for that.
• I asked if for our next transfer, would we still only transfer 2 or would he consider 3 since it would be our last try and also I am over 40.  He said he would not transfer 3 unless they don't think a third one would not survive (like the last transfer in January).
• I also asked about what the percentage is of women that have gone through a third transfer at NEDC and is still not successful.  He said he didn't have a number that he could provide, but it was very low.  I'm not really sure what I expected from him with this question.  I guess I was just curious... as I seem to alway seem to be one of those in the statistics.

He suggested that I do an endometrial biopsy before the start of the cycle for my next transfer.  He just wants to make sure there is nothing abnormal and make sure everything is good in the uterus.  

Since we have only 2 embryos left from our current donor family, we have to pick another donor family.  He suggested we consider picking a family with embryos that are at either the 2PN (2 day) or multicells (3 day) stage.  Our current 2 embryos are blastocysts (5 day).  If we pick new embryos from a different stage, we will not be able to use our current embryos for this next transfer as our primary as they embryos have to be at the same stage.  

Dr. Keenan said we should consider switching to 2PNs or multicells just to try something different for the next transfer.  There is no real medical reason to do so, but to try something different.  Having said that, he also suggested we consider the family that is right for us, and also to look at the age of the wife at the time the embryos were created.

After speaking with the doc, I found out that the March transfer calendar is fully booked.  So we will now have to wait till May for our next transfer.  Until then we have to:

1. Pick a new donor family, including deciding what stage embryos we want to adopt, as it will determine how many donor families we can pick from
2. Get an endometrial biopsy done before start of my cycle for the May transfer.

Donor Fees Surprise

I received an email from NEDC's accountant today about the donor fees that are due at our transfer on 9/22.  These fees are for embryo shipping, legal, counseling, storage and lab work relating to the cost of getting the embryos to NEDC.

The fees for our first donor is $775, and the second is $77.

I was a little shocked at the cost of the donor fees!  I wasn't expecting it to cost that much.  For some reason I was only expecting it to be between $200 and $300 per donor.  Not even sure where I got that number from but that was what I was expecting.  So the $775 was a shocker.   Also, the second donor's fee is only $77.  That's quite a huge difference between the 2 donors.  There can be many factors for the difference in cost, though I am not sure what.  I think I may ask the clinic about this.

We will only be responsible for the fees of the donor that embryos are thawed from for our transfer.  So, if we only thaw embryos from one family, we will not need to pay the fees for the second family.  In our case, we would be paying the $775 for 3 embryos, and potentially pay the $77 for the remaining 5.

To be honest, it makes me second guess our decision to switch the order of our embryos.  Now we are paying the higher fees for our first donor. I hate that money has such a huge impact on our decisions!

But in the end, it's just money.  If it works, it will all be worth it.  Plus if we end up having to use both donors, it will only be an additional $77, averaging out to be around $426 per donor.  That's not too bad right?

If you did a donated or adopted FET (frozen embryo transfer), what did you end up paying for the donor fees?

On another note, I sent the big check for our embryo transfer fee in the mail on Tuesday.  Looks like we are all paid up here, and only have to worry about the donor fees now, which is due on the day of the transfer.

Also, I checked with the Katie, the NEDC nurse and found out that at my baseline appointment on Friday, my lining was 4mm, and my estradiol level was less than 12.  Not sure what the numbers were required to be, but I was good to start Es.trace.

Donor Order Switch & Calendars

Yesterday, we finally made the decision to switch the order of our donor families.  If you remember, I had posted in the past how our first option, Family A is more like us physically and Family B, we seemed to have more in common and have more of a connection.  You can read more about our donor families here and here.

After discussing this with Babe, Debbie our counselor, and a few other people, we made the decision to switch the order.  I emailed Angie the coordinator at NEDC and she confirmed our changed, marked that in our medical records and informed the embryologist of this.

If you are keeping track, going forward we will refer to the donor families as this:

         First Family: Formerly known as Family B

         Second Family: Formerly known as Family A

So, going into our transfer on 9/22, we will thaw and transfer embryos from First Family first.  That means we will start off with the 3 blastocysts from First Family.  If only one or zero blasts survive the thaw, then blastocysts from Second Family (of which we have 5) will be thawed and transferred.  We will mostly likely transfer 2 embryos, but up to 3 if the quality of the third one is not great.

It's good to finally make the decision to switch.  Deep down I've wanted to switch the order for a while.  Now we pray that this works!

Things are going to start picking up medication wise.  I will start adding Es.trace twice a day next week, and then progesterone in oil (PIO) shots starts a few days before the transfer.  To keep all these in order, I created a calendar on Microsoft Word with all the medications, shots and appointments so they are all visible and easier to keep track of.  Also, I added them to my calendar on my iPhone, with reminders so I don't forget (I already forgot to take Lup.ron once, and took it 2 hours later than usual).

Below are a couple of screen shots of both.  They are kinda small and may be hard to see the details, but you get the idea.

FET Calendar created on Microsoft Word

Shots, meds and apointments with reminders on my iCal
(this only shows FET related items)

How do/did you keep track of your meds?

Meds, Acupunture & Photos!

Wow, this week started off busy!

This morning I put in my order for my meds.  Lu.pron, Es.trace, Progesterone in oil, and Va.lium.  A total of about $355.

Found out Lu.pron is not covered by my insurance, so I am paying $129 for it.  Es.trace, even with insurance comes up to $195 for 60 pills.  Kinda crazy!  That's more than $3 per pill.  Without insurance it would have come up to $243.  Unlike my previous IVF cycles, we have crappy insurance this time.  Still, I am grateful I do not need stimulation drugs like Follis.tim or Meno.pur which would cost thousands.  I should get my meds on Wednesday.  Won't get my FET protocol until 8/15.

I went for my acupuncture session today.  It was kind of weird going back after so long, but also nice.  The last time I was there was for my last IVF cycle almost exactly 3 years ago.  Back then she was pregnant with her second child.  Now, he is almost 3 years old.  Also, she bought out her partner, so she is running the business all by herself which is great because she really didn't need her partner.  She specializes in infertility and has had many success stories.  After my session, I asked her for some recommendations.  She said:

1. Avoid dairy as it can cause congestion in the body.  Especially if you drink coffee (which I currently still do), avoid using creamer (which I also love!), as it is especially bad.  Ok, ok, time to give them all up totally.
2. Eat more raspberries as they are great for building up the endometrial lining.
3. Use a warm/hot pad on the lower abdomen/pelvic area 2 - 3 times a week to stimulate blood flow to the uterus.

Fortunately, I do no need to take any Chinese herbs this time.  I did it for my last IVF cycle to help increase the quality of my eggs but since we are doing a FET (frozen embryo transfer) this time, no need for that.

When I got home, I received an email from Debbie, our fertility counselor for NEDC.  I had a discussion with her earlier today because we are considering switching around our order of donors.  Because the second donor family had be so upfront about sharing information and photos about their family, we felt we had more information about them than the first family.  After discussing this with Debbie, she suggested seeing if the first donor family would be willing to share some family photos.  The email from Debbie included 3 photos of our first donor family.  Oh my, they are a gorgeous family.  And the twin boys are so stinking cute.

Now that I have seen pictures from both donor families, I feel pretty good about both of them.  I feel like I am already in love with both families.  I still have not decided if we will switch the order or keep it the same, but for now, I love being able to put faces to names.  We have up to 2 weeks before our transfer to decide.

Finally, if you have not heard, I am having a giveaway in honor of my 40th birthday on Thursday!  Go leave me a comment here for a chance to win one of two $20 Amazon gift cards.

A Confession

Can you believe it's July 1st already?  Where did half the year go?  And yet it seems like September is so far away!

OK, I have a confession to make.

This weekend, I decided to do some Face.book/online stalking!  I'm not proud of it, but I did it anyways.

The mom of Family B has a fairly unique first name.  I know what state Family B lives in.  So I did a quick search on FB by her first name and state, and right away, a profile with the donor mom popped up.  It was the correct first name and state, and had a profile picture of a lady with two babies that looked like twins.  They looked like the mom and babies from the photos that Family B sent us.  Though the profile is private as I am not her friend, I was able to see that the music she likes matches what was put on her donor profile from NEDC.  I was able to tell with pretty high certainty that this is the donor mom.  From my conversation with Debbie, she told me that the donor mom grew up in the Asian country that was listed on FB her profile as her hometown and country.

So, I was able to find out her last name from FB.  I decided to google the donor dad by his first name, and her last name.  And up popped his name and profile on Linked.In, which also had a photo.  I could tell now that I found the right person based on his photo and his occupation.

So now, I know even more about the donor family - first and last names, city they live in and even what donor dad does for a living.  I probably shouldn't have done this as I am trying not to get too attached to a family that we may or may not have a relationship with in the future, pending how the transfer goes.  I'm not even sure if I am supposed to know this stuff.

But curiosity got the better of me!

Approved by The Donor Families!

We have been approved by our donor families!!

I was excited to receive an email from Angie, our patient coordinator at NEDC this morning that both of our donor families have accepted and approved us to adopt their embryos!  We are so excited!

Not only that, I received a second email from Angie with 2 photos from one of the families.  They have a set of boy/girl twins - the first photo of when they were babies, probably newborns, and the second as toddlers, probably around 3 or 4 years old.  These twins were born in 2009.

I also found out that both sets of embryos from the 2 families were frozen in 2008, and the children were born a week from each other in 2009.

Our next step is to work on our Open Donation Agreement.  A counselor from the National Fertility Support Center will be contacting us and the two donor families to begin our mediation process. This is the step where Babe and I will come up with an agreement with each family on, among other things,  how much communication we will have with them, what information will be communicated, as well as how the communication will take place.

We are so grateful to God that both families have accepted us, and also so quickly.  Since we just sent the email with our decision to NEDC on Friday morning, I was worried it might be awhile before we heard back.

Now we look forward to the Open Donation Agreement process!

Donor Profiles

First of all I need to clarify that we need to have at least 6 embryos for our transfer.  However, we are NOT going to transfer all six.  NEDC will usually transfer 2 or 3, but they want to make sure we have at least 6 embryos on hand.  In the unfortunate event that some embryos do not survive the thaw, we will have backups and not have to cancel the transfer.

We still have not selected our donor families.  I was very excited and was looking forward to going over the family profiles.  To me, this is the most exciting part of the process, selecting our future babies.  However, I didn't expect how difficult it would be.  There is no "perfect" match for us in the 8 profiles we have on hand.  Some are because of medical issues, others due to physical characteristics (height, color of eyes, ethnicity, etc.).  I have to keep in mind that even within our own families, we have medical issues as well, so I should be more open.  Also, most of the current donor families  only have between 3 and 5 embryos, which means we will have to select at least 2 different donor families.

There are 2 families that I am fairly comfortable with at this point.  However, I am not sharing this with Babe because I want him to make up his own mind.  I prefer if he tells me which families he likes first, then we can compare notes.  I've check with Angie the patient coordinator at NEDC and there are currently 12 anonymous donor families (i.e. closed adoption) that are either Asian-Causcasion or just Asian.  Babe wants to take a look at those families too, so I have requested the profiles from Angie.  The other thing to keep in mind is we can only select families that have agreed to open or closed adoption, and not a combination of both.  My preference is to have an open adoption, but we will see.

I've just started a new cycle.  Originally I was supposed to start BCP (birth control pills) right away when I start my new cycle.  But I asked the nurse that if I started my BCP right away, wouldn't I be on the it for 3 months straight?  She said I could start right away, or wait till July.  It didn't matter.  So I've decided to wait till July to start my BCP.  I won't be ordering my medication for the transfer until the beginning of August.  So for now, I will be medication free, at least for another month!