Maybe Baby: A Journey Into The Unknown

Baby #2 - we want one - we love the first one so much we want to have another one.

It was always in the plan - we wanted 2 kids, so they would have someone to play with, someone to compare experiences with, and someone to lean on and look after when we are both gone. We didn't want any more than 2 kids, because we didn't have enough bedrooms or a big enough car to have any more than 2 kids. And quite frankly, my sister has 3 kids, and she is ALWAYS busy, taking them to one place or another. She's a full time stay-at-home mum, and needs to be with her busy kids. Unfortunately, we can't afford for me to be a stay-at-home mum, especially if we wanted more kids! So, 2 kids it is, or at least, it was part of the plan.

But since discovering my little genetic defect, which caused all the dramas that was 2012, having another child became that much harder.

We had a few options:

1. We could take a huge gamble, fall pregnant naturally, and hope for the best. We have a 50% chance of having a child without the genetic defect, and a 75% chance of having a healthy child.
2. We could go through IVF and genetic screening to give ourselves a 97% chance of having a child without the genetic defect.
3. We could pray for my body to mutate the genetic defect out of my system.
4. We could give up on the idea of having more kids.

All of these options left our hearts aching.

Morally, we couldn't go through with Option 1. We didn't want to take the gamble and end up with another child with the genetic defect. Fact is, if the child is female and born with the defective gene, then our daughter will simply be a carrier and live a healthy normal life like myself. When the time comes for her to have kids, she will have to go through the above options. And then, you look at the facts again, and if we have another male child with the defective gene, he will have to go through the same horrors Sean went through in 2012. Just because Sean sailed through everything with flying colours, this does not guarantee an equally easy journey for another child faced with the same challenges.

I suppose you could say that we still had a 50% chance of having a healthy child, and that the gamble paid good enough odds for us to take. But knowing our luck, we would most likely end up putting another human being through all the pain and suffering that we have gone through, and since we had an option to stop the proliferation of the defective gene, we chose to bypass Option 1. And trust me, one bone marrow transplant is enough for anyone, ever.

And, well, Option 3 was a fanciful thought. Actually, more facetious than fanciful.

And Option 4 just left me in tears. Floods of tears. An inconsolable sobbing mess.

So, in the end, we went with Option 2.

For those not into acronyms, let me spell it out for you.

IVF doesn't just stand for In Vitro Fertilisation. To me, these 3 little letters spell "It's Very Frightening". IVF IS a very frightening experience. And it's also Invasive, Vexing and Frustrating.

To anyone who had no trouble falling pregnant and staying pregnant and go on to have a successful birth of a healthy baby, the thought of having to undergo IVF is very jarring. We had no trouble falling pregnant with Sean. To be honest, Sean was a happy little accident; he was the result of one night of fun after weeks of being too busy planning our wedding (and other family dramas). We always planned to have children; we'd just hoped to get through the wedding before trying for a baby. Our GP at the time was hugely surprised by our blessing - he deemed me too unhealthy to fall pregnant so easily without any medical intervention - I was too overweight and eating too much junk, whilst still partying like it's 1999.

The invasive nature of this whole clinical procedure - and it is all very clinical - is also hard to handle. There are needles and needles and more needles, and then there are tablets that you have to insert *up there*. And that's not all. There are regular blood tests, to make you feel even more like a pin cushion. And regular internal ultrasounds. Yes, internal. That means the sonographer has the task of jamming, *up there*, a long hard rod with cold gooey gel and wriggle it around like it's nobody's business. Oh, and trust me, this is still not the most demeaning thing. The doctor and the scientists have to somehow get the lovely little eggs out of my ovaries, so I get to sit in a chair with my legs spread from here to there, while they insert tubes up there to suck down the precious little eggs. And yes, Jonathan has to *go* into a cup.

This is all so romantic.

The worst thing? Trying to hold off on doing a poo in the days after the doctor and scientists collect the eggs. Because if I let my bowels move, I am likely to fall into a foetal position on the ground, in so much pain and agony that I will not be able to stand up again for hours. Oh yeah, that's happened too. I pooed, I stood up, I took 12 steps, and I collapsed. It took over 24 hours before I could walk again.

Another horrid thing is what happens after you insert the tablets *up there*. The nurses tell you to do it at night, and you have to lie down for at least an hour afterwards to help with the absorption. Too much information? That's not the horrid part. The horrid part is this - "the tablets will cause a bit of discharge, so please make sure you're wearing a sanitary pad". Too much information??? NOOOOO, I haven't even gotten to the good bit yet. The amount of discharge is, in fact, just a bit. A LOT of a bit. The first night I used the tablets, I thought a small thin panty liner would do the trick. Wrong. I woke up thinking I'd peed myself. My underwear was soaked.

Sayonara, dignity.

With all the added hormones and stress, the whole thing can seem very vexing. The 2-hour round trips to the city to get blood tests between 7am and 9am on the days when I'm not working (drive 50 minutes to the city, spend 15 minutes trying to find a parking space, 10 minutes to have some blood taken, then drive 50 minutes home). The 6am wake up calls on the days I am working, just to make it to the clinic before work.

And last, but most certainly not the least, is how frustrating the whole process is. The waiting. And waiting. And waiting. You want to just get on with it, but your body doesn't listen to you. Things happen when they happen, they say, over and over again. Nothing can be done to speed things up. You just have to let nature take its course. It is so utterly frustrating. The endless waiting. Just awful. Excruciatingly so.

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We officially started Project Baby 2.0 on 1 August 2012. We had been in discussions with a lot of different people leading up to this point, in particular to the wonderful Genetics team at the Sydney Children's Hospital, and had felt so supported and confident going into this whole thing. We had received so much information about IVF and genetic screening, so we felt knowledgeable going into discussions with a specialist. Our first appointment with the doctor was arranged, and we sat down and listened to him for an hour, describing the whole process to us in great detail. We were given a bunch of information to take home and read and digest. That hour felt like half a day, and we came away feeling a bit overwhelmed and a bit less confident.

We paid our first visit to The BabyLab on 3 September to meet with the geneticist, who went through a lot of the information that the doctor had gone through. There wasn't anything new or confusing in that information session, and we returned a couple of days later to undergo a huge day of interviews and blood tests. We met with a few of the nurses, and then we met with another scientist to go through all the information again. It was a very long day of meetings which left us feeling drained.

Jonathan returned to The BabyLab by himself on 10 September for his Andrology appointment. This was the nice way of saying he had to *go* into a cup.

Then there was nothing to do but wait. I had to wait for the start of my 3rd cycle after these tests before The BabyLab was ready to hit the Go button.

Three months later, I was back at The BabyLab to collect the huge stash of drugs that would stimulate my ovaries and produce a plethora of eggs. It was Christmas Eve. Jonathan learned to load the needles and inject the shots into my buttocks. For 2 weeks, every morning, 2 needles just after we woke up. Good morning to you too, honey. Every 2nd morning, I returned to The BabyLab between 7am and 9am to get blood tests and internal scans.

On 3 January 2013, we were given the good news - to go ahead and inject the trigger medication, that will help the ovaries to release the eggs. We returned to The BabyLab on 5 January for the egg and sperm collection. Due to the position of my ovaries, I was given the option to go under a general anaesthetic so that the collection would be more comfortable and less traumatic. Ahhhh... sweet sweet drugs. I was glad to take the general, as I was in quite a bit of discomfort afterwards.

Without warning, on the morning of 6 January, some 26 hours after the procedure, I crumpled into a heap on the ground, in so much pain I couldn't stand, straighten up or walk. It was frightening, to say the least. I didn't know why I was in so much pain. As it turned out, the doctor and the scientist were quite aggressive during the egg collection, to ensure the maximum haul possible. We were to find out much later that a small number of women do experience the kind of paralysing pain that I felt.

It just would have been really nice to have some sort of warning. It honestly felt like my uterus imploded.

We were given the good news a few days later. 11 eggs were collected, and 8 of those were fertilised. 7 of those continued to grow, and our hopes of only needing to go through one round of IVF soared. The good news? The scientists did end up having something to test. ONE embryo was suitable for genetic testing.

One, out of 8.

This news was huge blow to us. The doctor suggested another round of IVF, and have this one embryo frozen for the time being. Freezing this embryo would mean that the scientists could do the testing in one hit, with hopefully something from the second round. It would also be a cost reduction to us to "batch" up the testing. We didn't really have to think about this for too long - we pretty much agreed straight away that this was the best cause of action.

More waiting ensued. We weren't able to go again for another 2 cycles. The waiting nearly drove me mad.

Round 2, and I asked every medical staff to not tell me any stats. I didn't want to know how many follicles they could see in my growing ovaries. I didn't want to know how many eggs were collected. I simply didn't want to talk about anything that would get my hopes up about this round. I was so keen on these stats in Round 1, and having been told how great I was doing for someone my age, and how awesome it was that the scientists and the doctor were able to collect so many eggs, and how amazing it was that so many of the eggs were fertilised, it was heartbreaking to end up with just one embryo that was suitable for testing. I didn't want to get my hopes up, and I thought I made myself very clear to all the medical staff of my wishes.

Unfortunately, my requests and wishes were not respected. But that's another story.

The day of the egg collection came, and I was prepared for the ensuing pain, but thankfully it wasn't as bad as Round 1. 9 eggs were collected, with 5 fertilised. We netted another ONE embryo for testing.

Two rounds. Two embryos. And this is before testing.

Of the 2 factors we were running out of - being time and money - we'd run of money. We couldn't afford to do another round of IVF, so we gave our permission for the two embryos to be genetically tested.

More waiting, and on 3 April, we got the news we were hoping for. We had ONE embryo that was 99% SCID free and 95% chromosomally sound. An almost perfect little bunch of cells.

Again, we were warned that there was no guarantee that this almost perfect embryo would result in a successful pregnancy. And we had to wait some more before the transfer could happen.

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I have always considered 25 June to be "Half Christmas". It's exactly 6 months to Christmas Day, one of my favourite days of the year. And with such a large family these days, immediate and extended, it's also time to start thinking about Christmas presents.

Today is "Half Christmas". And our present for "Half Christmas" this year was getting me pregnant.

The transfer happened earlier today. We went to The BabyLab and signed a few more forms, and got taken into the clinic. We met with the scientist and were told that our almost perfect embryo, our only hope, our Magic Bean, had been thawed. She told us that The BabyLab had a rating system, and any thawed embryos that scored below 60% would be deemed unsuitable for transfer. She went on to tell us a few other things, but we were now focused on what Magic Bean scored. Our almost perfect embryo, our only hope, our Magic Bean scored 100%.

The doctor arrived, and we walked into a theatre room. I sat up on the chair, and spread my legs from here to there. Jonathan held my hand as the doctor insert a tube *up there*, and in a matter of seconds, we watched with amazement as a little puff of bubbles was deposited in my uterus.

And then it was all over.

Everyone left. I got dressed and we left The BabyLab. Perhaps for the last time. And we came home.

And all we can do now is wait.

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In life, there are no guarantees. In life, there are no absolutes. (Except for death and taxes.) That's what makes life so interesting. We have now done our best to realise our dream of becoming a family of four. Now it's up to Magic Bean to decide whether he wants to join us, and make us a family of four.

My follow up blood test is scheduled for 5 July. That's when we'll find out whether Magic Bean has "taken".

In the meantime, I wonder how many home pregnancy tests I can pee on to keep me from going insane?!