Saturday, September 22, 2018

Sibling Journey - My Cousin is Our Surrogate!

How have I not posted in a year?!?

Oh yes, I've been busy with our baby! Our miracle baby was born last July with my brother's close childhood friend carrying for us. And every single day, we still can't get over that he's in our lives.

He loves watching the laundry machine in action:



And... I've always wanted more kids, in fact I've always wanted 3, but definitely more than 1, so we started meeting with our doctor again last spring, before D was even born to start the surrogacy process for baby #2 (because it can take 6+ months to get someone through the process plus the gestation period, so I didn't want to wait).

Our doctor advised us not to get started until 6 months after the baby was born so that we could acclimate. He said that will be one of the most stressful times of our lives. (Which deserves its own post but in brief: the first 6 months I didn't enjoy as much as I thought I would, I found the newborn stage tedious and felt suuuuuper guilty for not enjoying it more when we had wanted this so badly. I even wanted to go back to work after 6 weeks. I did reach a turning point when he turned 6 months and could do more and now I absolutely love spending time with him.)

I appreciated our doctor's advice but I also knew I wanted to get on this.

So, in August of last year, when one of my cousins was getting married and had a girls weekend away 2 weeks before her wedding, I went partly because I'm super close to her sister who was going to be there and encouraged me to come.  N and I are one year apart, grew up in the same town, went to the same high school, she even did a semester at my college to spend time with me! We've traveled together and have been there for each other, even as opposite as our lives got - she started having kids when she was 23, had 4 of them, went through a bad divorce, meanwhile I got married in my early 30s and proceeded to not be able to start my family.

So at this girls weekend, someone asked me if we were going to do this again and have another baby, to which I said, we are actually going to contact our surrogacy agency soon to help us find someone. N chimed in and said "you know I'd do that for you, right?" which caught me off guard. She then said, "remember, I wanted to do it the first time around for you". And then it all came back to me... "yes, I said, and remember because there are Zika scares in FL [where she lives], we couldn't do it". To which she said, "well, there isn't anymore".

I proceeded to say "really, you'd really want to do this for us"... she'd been in a new relationship for 4 years, was planning a wedding the following year, I wasn't sure how he'd feel about it. But she was steadfast and said "yes". I told her to make sure he'd be ok and talked through a lot of the annoying process stuff about surrogacy and she was ok about it all.

Two weeks later at my cousin's wedding, she said she talked with her partner and they are on board!

They wanted to time it so that an embryo transfer would happen after their June 2018 wedding so we mapped it all out that she/they'd do all the prep work ahead of time, so the brief timeline was:

  • Nov 2017 - got N screened with the agency
  • Dec 2017 - got N health insurance on the exchange
  • Feb 2018 - N and her partner did the psychological evaluation
  • April 2018 - N and her partner did the medical screening at our clinic in MD
  • May 2018 - N did the mock cycle
  • June-July 2018 - legal clearance
  • August 2018 - N prepped for the embryo transfer which was supposed to be August 31 but got pushed to Sept 4
That makes it all seem easy enough, but there were a lot of hiccups and logistical annoyances which led to my recurrence of depression and anxiety. I ended up back on meds because even though we'd had success with the first surrogacy, it was resurrecting all the pain from my failed attempts and I couldn't rationalize my way out of it. So that part was a bummer and it took me awhile to recognize it because it was happening when my baby was still a newborn and we were into the stressful holiday season...

By Feb when my husband and I were talking about our upcoming summer and I wasn't looking forward to it, I knew I should get back in with my therapist and psychiatrist and likely get back on meds. Which I did. Which was helpful. 

[Side note, I strongly belief no one should have to suffer like that if they don't need to be and there is nothing wrong with taking meds, in fact, I highly recommend them, not as a crutch but so many are reluctant to get on them, like I was, and it can truly make a difference on being more focused and neutralizing how one feels].

Anyway, some of the logistical issues along the way were:
  • Our Agency - they weren't convinced that N fit the 'surrogate profile' because she really didn't. She wasn't doing this as a 'job', she was doing this because I'm her cousin. So we kept pushing and saying we really want her. I took over communications directly with my cousin which was fine but just added more work for me to stay on top of all the logistics. We reduced the agency's role to communicating with my husband on major milestones.
  • The FL Clinic for Monitoring - 
    • The doctor - N lives in a smaller city in FL and the main fertility clinic just wasn't on top of it. The doctor there several times gave incorrect results from ultrasounds (mis-measured her lining several times which would've resulted in us not being able to move forward with her; thank goodness my doctor in MD/DC caught it and asked for images to be sent because we didn't trust this doctor's diagnosis - I still want to report this doctor, how awful to think that he may be disqualifying people for no reason!). 
    • Being organized - The clinic just also wasn't on top of being organized. Once they forgot to send the bloodwork out which made me slightly panic for an extra day unnecessarily. And the worst was that they forgot to send scans on the last appt and closed at noon so my nurse couldn't even follow-up which resulted in us having to move the transfer date when our travel arrangements had already been set.
But ultimately, she came up here and had the transfer on Sept 4. 

From transfer day including the sign at the clinic and shirts I had made for us:



That was a nice day for us to spend together and it's been so nice to have this close emotional journey with her. In fact, that day she said "you know, people say a lot 'I'd do anything for you' but I really mean it."

Here we are as kids, awwwwww:



During the 2 week wait, I was starting to go crazy the last week of it and on Day 9 post transfer I asked her to take a home test and was just bracing myself for bad news...

Well, it was 2 strong lines!

I ugly cried that morning. Just couldn't believe it. Still can't.

How on earth are we this lucky two times in a row??

[Another side note: I had a hard time processing this with IMs - Intended Moms especially friends of mine who had a lot of trouble with surrogacy. This experience makes me feel like I got it too easy, like getting pregnant on your first IUI, like I didn't earn my badge of honor... but all that said, I'm ok with it, more than ok with this part having been easy for us. It's just too bad that there is this thing out there that seems to be that unless you've suffered as much as I have, it's hard for me to truly be happy for you without feeling some sort of resentment or something...]

Anyway, her bloodwork came back on Mon, Sept 17 at 853! Super strong and her numbers more than doubled to 2133 two days later! She's a rock star.

I'm going to FL on Oct 2 for the first heartbeat ultrasound and couldn't be happier!

Our little D will have a sibling. :)

PS - And I really do feel positively going into this. I know there's the normal worries that can happen to any pregnancy but I also know that I don't have to carry the baggage of what happened to me into this pregnancy. I can put a wall between what happened to me vs what's happened to us with surrogacy.

It's funny, on her bloodwork day, I told N "If you're still pregnant today, you should go ahead and make the doubling appt on Wed" and she said "you mean there's a chance I'm not pregnant anymore?"

I loved her innocence with it. I mean, yes, there's a chance (hadn't it happened to me over and over and over...), but I wasn't worried about it, I said. :)

Here we go! Miracle #2!

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