The pure medical side of it...

Today I want to talk about what they we went through for this surrogacy. Well right there, the term is quite wrong, as we did not have a surrogate but a gestational carrier. But I'll get to that later. I have to warn you, this is very technical...

Due to my radical hysterectomy, I don't have an uterus anymore. So naturally, I am no longer able to become pregnant or carry a child. Oh yes, that was very hard to digest when you are in the middle of your best years to become a family or have the existing one growing. But thank God to my very good oncologist, I still have my ovaries. And those are very important, as it is here where the eggs are situated and from where they decent to the uterus, either to create a baby or to have your monthly visitor coming. A woman, or baby girl, is born with ALL the eggs and those are inactive until puberty. So I still have some hundreds of eggs inside of me, so I am not that infertile as I first thought I might be. There was hope...

So we just had to use a carrier to carry our baby - kind of borrowing someone's 'oven' for 'only' about nine months. Anybody??? This person is called a Gestational Carrier, rather than a surrogate, as we are using our own eggs and sperm and not hers! They also call it sometimes host uterus, which is really what it is in our case - referring back to the borrowed 'oven'.

First, they had to find where my cycle is, because I don't have monthly menstruation anymore. Then they had to stimulate my egg production, to take out as many eggs as possible. Yes, I had to take some drugs to do so, fertility drugs, by injection, but to my surprise, it did not hurt as much as I anticipated it. (You have to know that I am terrified by needles, and usually have to be laid down when blood is drawn!) I had to go to the clinic multiple times, even daily, to get blood drawn and have ultrasounds to determine how many eggs there were and how big they are.

Here I want to stop the technicalities for a moment and share an incident that kind of made me mad at the time, but now I can smile about it. One time, I was laying on the table to have a technician do the ultrasound. This is a very good example of when the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Because this lady was looking and looking and starting to hurt me digging this instrument deeper inside me. Usually I am very quiet because you know those people have a degree for what they are doing, so I figured this person knows what she is looking for. But after a while I got concerned, so I asked her what was the matter. And in all sincerity, she said she is looking for my uterus. Can you believe that? So I told her that I don't have one anymore, and that's the reason why we are at a fertility clinic! Unbelievable.

So back to the real deal: by the size of the eggs, my day of retrieval was decided upon. At the same time, our carrier was taking her daily share of medications, both injections and oral ones, and had to be monitored as well, but not as often. For some reason, my eggs took two days longer than usual, but that was not a problem for the carrier. Retrieval of the eggs is done through a small one-hour-procedure, under narcoses.
Once they removed my eggs, they fertilized them with the partner's sperm and waited to see how many take on and how many don't. In my case, they removed nine eggs, four were lost in the process, five took the sperm. After a couple of days, only two more were left. On the day of the transfer, one of the fertilized eggs were put into our carrier. (It was her will to only use one egg, she was afraid of having to carry multiples.) And now we had to wait fourteen days that felt like forever!!!.......

That day, the carrier had to go to the clinic to have a pregnancy test done and some blood drawn. She had to go back home and waited with us until the end of the day.... Oh, we were all sitting like on fire. Finally, the call came and..... (drum roll)... we were pregnant!!! Yeah....

We have one fertilized egg, well an embryo, waiting in the freezer. We have to see what will happen to this little fellow....