Parting Gifts

Hi all ICLWers...welcome to my little piece of the blogosphere. Brief background--TTC for nearly 3 years, just failed at IVF/ICSI #3, moving on to Domestic Infant Adoption. Hope you enjoy your visit!

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So I'm back after a nice week off the grid. My work computer died last Friday, so while I was traveling this week I had no way to check in, even if I had wanted to. The new computer has arrived and even though I'll be on the road this weekend, I will do my best to get caught up. Thanks again to everyone for your tremendous support after our bummer news last Saturday. I can't begin to tell you how much love there is in this community--you are all so special to me. As for the BFN, it feels like a decade ago. I can't believe it has only been one week. A week that has altered my future forever, for the better. A brief update follows.

Saturday sucked, I cried for awhile--good, gutteral cries where the sounds you make don't even sound human. My heart was broken...for our embryos, for our future, for my husband. For me. At some point I must have just been tired of crying because it stopped and all I wanted to do was go drink at the Irish pub with DH. We had a great evening out, celebrating St. Pat's early and 4 or 5 pints of Smithwick's later I passed out at home remembering how blessed I am to have such a terrific husband.

The next day we filled out our paperwork for the adoption agency to commit to the May group/education class. I mailed our homestudy/profile $ and the papers on Thursday and we will hopefully get our homestudy packet sometime next week. We both feel that this is the right next move for us--I personally believe that this IS God's plan for us. He has chosen us for whatever reason to bring a little one into our family in an untraditional way and I feel honored and humbled to be in this position. Our home and our family will grow, and the love we have for each other will get to be shared with a little person who needs a special place to call his or her forever home. What a truly amazing gift God has given us.

As excited as I am, we are, about the adoption, I knew that I hadn't even come close to starting to grieve the loss of having my own children. I knew that I hadn't hardly processed it yet, but moving forward felt pretty good. So then, I had my WTF phone call with Dr. L on Monday. He wasn't on call the day of the result, but he wanted to review the cycle and give me his take on things. He believes that my egg quality is poor, or fragile, and therefore we are getting very low quality embryos. He fully admits he has no idea why at age 29 I would have low ovarian reserve and such poor quality eggs, and even though I had a good number of eggs retrieved, I was on max meds and stimmed for such a long time. This certainly doesn't help egg quality. The reality of the situation is that IVF is not going to work for us. It's really about separating science from biology, and our issue is biological. Science cannot most likely overcome this, and really even a different lab is not going to necessarily have better results. Of course, donor egg is always an option. What really surprised me were his next comments, though. He believes that when a patient has lower quality eggs, the best place for them to fertilize and develop is in the mom, like nature would do. A lab is really so altering for a low quality embryo, but the mom's got everything it needs and can support its development better than any artifical environment. His thought is that since I have one working ovary, which ovulates every month just fine, and one supposedly open, functioning tube, there is nothing that says I couldn't concieve naturally at some point in the next 10 years or so. Since science is going to be limiting for us, he suggests having a laparoscopy and a hysteroscopy, make sure everything is clean, normal and in good working order and then send us on our way to hopefully one day actually get pregnant the normal-people way. Dh's morph isn't a big concern since his counts and motility are fair to good, and we know that his swimmers can fertilize an egg (he passed the acrosome reaction test). Dr. L believes that we still have a slim chance and that all hope is not lost.

So my parting gifts from Dr. L will be two super fun surgeries, a pat on the hand and a have a nice life. We are scheduled for April.

I'll get back to how I feel about all this later, but what a strange call. All I know is one step in front of the other. And another. And another.

Hope everyone had a good week...I so look forward to getting caught up and to visiting new blog homes during ICLW!