The 1%

Today we met with Dr. B to chat about our options.  Long story short, we basically have a 1% chance of having a baby with my eggs and Brett's swimmers.  And it felt like he was being generous with us.  In his view, the high FSH and the low AMH point to an 'insult' my ovaries endured as a result of the chemotherapy.  Add that to my age, which isn't so much a factor, but... He has seen women with the high FSH and the low AMH get pregnant and have a baby, but it is very, very rare.  And none of those women had undergone chemotherapy.   

We can try, for as many times as we want, a medicated IUI (intrauterine insemination) with injectables to induce a crazy hyper stimulation of my ovaries, a trigger shot to induce ovulation and then insemination.  The medications are apparently pretty rough on a person and the whole thing does not usually work.  (So how is this an option?) We could luck out with a good egg, but, as he said, we only have a 1% chance of success.  It's tempting.  Our insurance will cover about half of the cost of the procedure. So basically about $2,000 out-of-pocket... for a 1% chance.  

Hope.  It really gets you.  

Then, we were told about our other option.  Our greatest chance (if I want to actually conceive a carry a pregnancy), at a nearly 75-80% success rate, is to go with donor egg IVF.  And that was it.  He suggested we take the holidays off, think about what we wanted to do and then after the 1st of the year, if we wanted, move forward.  

We were then ushered to a conference room and introduced to a super friendly lady, probably my age, and given a new folder full of documents.  This time, all about donor egg IVF.  The tests we'd need, the process for choosing a donor, the timeline for synching your cycle with that of the donor, and then finally, retrieving the eggs, fertilizing them and transfer.  Any leftovers, you can freeze for later use (failed IVF, siblings) and or you can donate them.  The price tag for all this?  $35,000. 

Ugh. 

I knew that we were probably going to get this news, so in many ways, I'm not too shocked, too upset.  In a lot of ways, it feels good to know what we are dealing with and that we still have a few options left.  I haven't cried, yet.  Maybe I will still.  If I have to hear about Princess Kate and her entire pregnancy from now until she has this royal baby, that might do me in.  I think more than anything, at this point, I feel like some of the pressure is off.  If we really only focus on getting pregnant naturally, then time is of the essence, and that's a lot of pressure and stress on both Brett and I.  To be honest, it makes everything feel so utterly shitty.  Every month, every day, every cycle feels like a ticking time bomb.  To know that likely our own efforts have a slim chance of working means we can stop focusing on that so intensely.  To know that likely our own efforts have a slim chance of working also means we can take our time.  IVF with a donor egg can't happen in less than 4 months time and it can happen as far from now as we want.  We can breath a sigh of relief for that.  We have time. 

We can time it around my work calendar. We can time it around our ability to come up with the funds for this.  We can time it around Brett's school schedule.  Whatever we want.  We now have the luxury of time.  

Yes, if we go this route, I won't genetically be this baby's mother.  But biologically and in every other way, I will be.  At first, the idea of donor eggs just pissed me off.  "Oh yeah, great, some young fertile jerk's eggs - isn't she so lucky.  So many extra eggs she can donate them to sad sacks like me."  But that has passed.  I realized that for me, I truly do want the experience of carrying a baby.  I've had it twice in the last year and even though it didn't last, it was an experience that I'd like to see through.  

So we will go forward from here.  We will follow Dr. B's advice and take off the rest of the year from doing much more other than what we might try on our own.  And we will start to try and figure out how the hell we will pay for this.  We will do everything Suzie Orman would suggest you never do for something like this.  We will look into refinancing our house, borrowing from retirement, and might even start a GoFundUs website that a friend suggested.  I guess, at the end of the day, we will do whatever it takes in order to do this thing.  One way or the other, we will just have to figure it out.  

If only we were part of that other 1%, we'd be set.