How IVF made our family
I can’t really explain our family without talking about IVF. I don’t know if I believe in fate or anything like that, but I do feel like we were right where we needed to be during this stage of our lives.
Flashback to our younger, sort-of-care-free selves. We moved from London to the States in 2015 because we wanted to settle down closer to my family, buy a house, and have a baby (more about our story here). We started trying for real in 2016. After almost a year, we sought medical intervention. Something wasn’t right, why weren’t our bodies doing what they were supposed to do?
Turns out we both had medical issues that made conceiving next to impossible (looking at you, endometriosis and varicocele). We tried one IUI. It failed and it felt like a waste of time and money. I felt stupid for even thinking it might work.
Having biological children is something you just take for granted. You try to plan it and time it just right. Make sure you have the right partner, the right career, the right house. Now let’s have a baby! Suddenly, when that choice isn’t there, you feel like you lose part of your humanity. Your body has let you down in the most fundamental way and you hate every pregnancy announcement.
Infertility makes every month a failure.
And what you realize during fertility treatments is there’s no quick fix. All you do is a lot of waiting. Waiting for the next appointment, waiting for the next test, waiting for the results of that test, waiting for the surgery, waiting to heal from the surgery, waiting for the next appointment. And on and on. Until it’s time to bring out the big guns: IVF.
During IVF, you wait some more. And you have a lot of time to think about what-if’s. What if it works? What if it doesn’t? What if we need to do another egg retrieval? What if I don’t want to try again? What if we can’t have kids? You really think about adoption and embryo donation and never having kids. All these ideas that maybe passed through your mind as abstracts are now very real possibilities to turn over in your head. I found myself doing a lot of soul searching and a lot of browsing infertility chats on Reddit. Those were dark days.
The day of the transfer, we went for a coffee afterwards. I looked down and one of the little stones in my engagement ring was gone. I thought it was a bad sign. But.
It worked.
We got our daughter. She was fucking perfect. And we were swept up in the whirlwind of first-time parenthood. Of course, like most first-time parents, you think to yourself, Will I want to do this again? When should we try again? Should we even try again? Except for us there was the added curveball of needing doctors to help make it happen. We had two frozen embryos waiting.
I don’t want three kids! I’d agonize to myself in the shower, thinking that since our first embryo worked, of course the other two would work too. And how could I choose one of my embryos and discard the other? It’s easy to think of them as a few cells in a Petri dish until you see those cells turn into a human.
But they didn’t work. During the summer and fall when our daughter was 2-going-on-3, we tried again. The first frozen embryo transfer was a clear failure. The second was something the IVF community calls “beta hell” aka chemical pregnancy. In normal life, you likely wouldn’t even know it was happening, maybe your period is a little late oh well. But since it’s IVF, you get blood draws every other day to see how the embryo is struggling. And you have to keep doing your progesterone shots every night even though you know it’s not going to work. It sucks.
Not only were we exhausted by the process, our insurance was exhausted too. Our lifetime max for fertility coverage was $25,000. We spent that on IVF and the first frozen embryo transfer. We paid for the second transfer out of pocket, an extra kick in the teeth that each of those stupid beta hell blood draws was like $100 from my bank account.
So, that was it. But.
I started a new job that had fertility insurance. A new chance! I wanted to try again. My husband wanted to move on. We are great just the three of us, let’s enjoy our family. We agreed (probably more like, I decided) that we would try one more time and then close the door. Either way, we were both excited to put this chapter behind us. We were sick of living in limbo not knowing how big our family would ultimately be, sick of holding onto the old baby stuff, sick of planning future events with the what-ifs in mind.
We kept telling ourselves, it’s fine if it doesn’t work, we are so happy and lucky already. But, of course, you still want it to work. The difference between my first egg retrieval at age 31 when we got three strong embryos and my second egg retrieval at 36-almost-37 when we got one okay embryo and one poor embryo was shocking.
The day of the transfer I felt so sad. I felt like IVF had slammed its door in my face without so much as a farewell. IVF, you bitch. This is how you treat me after we’ve been through so much together?
Except, it worked. Again.
We got our second miracle daughter from that okay embryo. That was almost a year ago to the day. Her birthday is in just a few weeks. And we still have that last embryo on ice. (And I still don’t want three kids and I still don’t want to discard those cells.)
So, here we are. Done with years of IVF, done with the needles and the what-ifs and the waiting and the soul searching. We are in the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s beautiful.
