Ultrasound day!

OUr appointment was this monring at 8am, bright and early. I will admit that last night I was a little nervous and slightly worried. Praise Jesus, everything is awesome! We were able to see one perfect beating heart, and the baby measures croen to rump 5.8 mm, which is prefectly on for 6weeks 3 days, which is what I am by dates. We were saddened to hear that one of our babies went straight to the arms of Jesus, but we celebrate the life of this little one that He has chosen to bless us with! THANK YOU LORD! I have never been so aware of the amazing miracle life is, as I have been going through this process. Embryos may be place into your womb, but only the hand of God Himself determines which embryos will continue on to life on earth. Humbling to think about. We give thanks today for this amazing blessing!!! Each morning I rise and feel nausea I praise God that this baby continues to grow! Thank you to all those who have been praying!!!



First glimpse!

The 2 week wait

If there's one thing I'm not good at, it's waiting. Blood test BHCG day, to see if I was pregnant as a result of this transfer, was set by my clinic for October 1st, 11 days after the transfer. 11 days, that's a breeze... right? Not so much... not when ALL you are thinking about is if this symptom, or that cramping means something good or bad... I was however allowed by my loving husband to buy 3 first response tests in the US (SO MUCH CHEAPER) and bring them home. I was SURE the transfer had worked by day 3 post transfer. I can't explain it, I just felt pregnant. My friend convinced me to hold off testing until day 5 or 6 post transfer. I compromised and got up at 3 am and tested at day 5.5 post transfer. I was a little worried that my urine wouldn't be concentrated enough after such a short time, but I woke up in the night and ALL i could think about was that I needed to test, because I KNEW it would be positive. So, I crept into the bathroom and with shaking hands I waited... within seconds I had it... A POSITIVE!

  The following morning I felt the need to make sure that line was getting darker... and praise the Lord, it was double as dark! By day 8 post 5 day transfer, the test line was darker than the control line. Blessed be the name of the Lord!

 By day 8 and 9 post transfer I was starting to feel some nausea throughout the day, which was a welcomed symptom! Day 11 post transfer was blood test day, to confirm that my hcg levels were where my clinic was happy with them. I found this digital test kicking around and thought I would try it out! I've never actually seen these words on a digital test before, so it was neat...

 Day 11 post transfer, my clinic was hoping for a bhcg of 100 or greater... mine was 229!! WOOOHOOO! Some very, very nonmedical websites listed this beta in the twins zone, although nothing can really tell except an ultrasound! I went for a repeat bhcg blood test 48 hours later with the hope for doubling the 229... it came back more than double at 526! My last bhcg was on Oct 9th, 18 days post transfer and it was 4092! Thank you Lord! All awesome numbers. Now we wait for our first ultrasound Oct 16th!

Transfer day

We drove to Seattle for our transfer, overall it was about 2200km of driving for us, but the trip was broken up with visits along the way. On Sept 20th, transfer day, we went to Pike place market for the morning to attempt to distract me from looking at the clock every 2 seconds. Finally the time came for drinking of liters of water and taking Valium. I'm going to say, I didn't think the Valium was actually doing anything for me. But my husband would say, it did  A LOT! The team at our clinic was fantastic. Everyone was very friendly and the clinic itself was beautiful. We went to the transfer room right away and the embryologist came into to show us photos of our beautiful babies. We had thawed 3 embryos, but unfortunately, one of the embryos did not survive the thaw. The other two, however, were growing strong and expanding as they should. I had been really nervous about the embryos not surviving the thaw, or if only one survived the thaw, as we really hoped for transfer of 2 embryos. As I have been told over and over again, I shouldn't have worried, God is in control, not me. During the actual transfer, we watched on a screen in the room as our embryos were moved from the culture dish and loaded into the transfer catheter. It was really cool to see them and KNOW they were really going into my uterus! The transfer was smooth and after about 15 mins of resting still, we were sent to our hotel! Our clinic is not strict at all about bed rest, and even encouraged us to go out for a nice supper. Too bad for the Valium... I slept all afternoon and evening :) The day following the transfer we spent lounging in our hotel watching movies and praying that these babies were implanting!!!!

Profiles

We were given a number of profiles to choose from. How overwhelming! We told our clinic that we were open to any ethnicity, including mixed ethnicity embryos. Being open gave us a number of embryos to consider. It seemed so weird and wrong almost, to look through these profiles and try to decide which may become our child or children. We poured over the profiles for an evening, trying to figure out how one makes this choice. In the end, we felt that it was best if we didn't make the choice, so we emailed our coordinator and asked that she make the choice for her. All we want is a baby in the end... it matters not at all to us what skin color that child has, what genetic make up the child has, or what illnesses might run in the genes. So we asked the clinic to choose for us the embryos that had the best chance of surviving. Within an hour, we had our match!

What is embryo adoption?

Embryo adoption stems from a problem that many couples face after having IVF treatments. During IVF treatments, often many extra embryos are created than will be used for completion of their family. Couples are then faced with the choice of what to do with their extra embryos...
1: destroy them
2: donated them to science
3:give them to other couples for adoption, meaning the embryos will be transferred into the adoptive mother's uterus and she will carry the pregnancy and deliver her adopted child.

Currently in the USA there are about 500,000 frozen embryos in storage, About 9,000 per year will be adopted.

Adoptions may be done as open adoptions, with full contact between families, or by anonymous donation, with very little being known about the characteristics of the biological parents.

Our embryo adoption was done through an excellent fertility clinic in Seattle, and our adoption was totally anonymous. More about being matched to embryos in the next post.