Our little journey

Its a nice rainy afternoon here. The kind of afternoon that is nicer when you're dry at home as I am, instead of out and about in the world. Since this journal is largely about our babies and this journey we've been on; and since I started the journal sort of half-way through I thought I'd post a few pictures of the beginning. Consider this the sitcom episode that looks back over the past year and pieces together things you know already happened, but maybe forgot.

So for us, having children didn't really begin until we began fertility treatments. After a failed IUI, we knew our only option was IVF and we were referred to Dr. Vaughn. I'm not sure what I want to say about IVF exactly.

These are my IVF drugs. Like so many things in my life, if its worth anything its not going to be easy. And it wasn't easy. Would I do it again? Of course. It was an incredible experience.

The first time I had to give myself an injection, and I'm not thrilled about needles you know, so I have my eyes closed tight and Andre says, "don't close your eyes while giving yourself an injection!" So I opened my eyes, counted to three...then counted to three again...okay, deep breath, one, two, three...after about 1/2 an hour and Andre saying "just do it," over and over I finally injected my first shot. By the end of the month it was no big deal. The scary part came from the fear that I would somehow mess it all up. But I discovered that doctors don't let their patients do things that are easy to mess up. So even after one of our shots wouldn't work properly, and maybe I gave myself a double dose trying to get it to work, it was still, "fine."

The emotional ups and downs of dealing with fertility issues was by far the most difficult. I don't think people really understand unless they've gone through it. For us, to get pregnant after one cycle of IVF I realize how fortunate we were and I feel a lot of respect for those couples who endure numerous cycles, miscarriages, and losses. Not everyone understood our choice to pursue IVF and while some comments were quite hurtful, you can't really make life decisions based on other people's opinions or lack of tact. We found a lot of strength in each other and I learned many things about how awesome my husband is and how great our marriage is.

For us, I personally didn't want to feel like somehow we were failures because we couldn't have a child without help. A lot of the other women I talked to during that time who were going through similar issues expressed those feelings. I certainly understand that, but for us, that wasn't how we saw our situation. Andre has always been open about having had testicular cancer twice and has said that talking to other people may help them. We faced IVF in the same manner and told everyone. There are so many intricate hormones and steps in fertility, where's the shame in one not working? To me, it was the equivalent of wearing glasses; some people's eyes just don't work right. Well our bodies didn't quite work right, so we made them do what they were suppose to do. And that was absolutely amazing.

The whole process was amazing. The doctors and technicians have advanced so much in so little time. In a nutshell: they used medications to stop my body from doing what it normally does and then used other medications to make my body do something it couldn't normally do--over produce eggs. Then they gave me "the shot" which made my body release the eggs at exactly the right time so the doctor would be there to get them. Absolutely brilliant.

We also used intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), shown in the picture (although this isn't our material). They pick up one sperm in a glass pipette, break off its tail, and insert it directly into the egg. You can tell this is a mature egg because it has a little hat on. The glass pipette is 1/2 the size of a red blood cell. Once again amazing.

After that we wait to see what happens. Out of the 15 eggs my body produced our doctor was able to retrieve 8. Out of those 8, 7 eggs fertilized. These fertilized eggs continued to divide. Some did better than others and on day 3 they transferred the two best looking embryos. One was 7 cells and one was 9 cells. This is the actual picture of our embryos. The remaining 5 embryos didn't make it past day 3. For some reason they just stopped growing. I was sad about that and fearful that if this cycle didn't work that we would have to start all over again from the very beginning.

So, when we found out we were pregnant it was such a great feeling. And when we found out it was twins--that was awesome. This is our first picture of the twins taken by Dr. Vaughn at just 4 weeks and 6 days.

A lot of people ask us if they are identical or fraternal. Because they are both girls we don't know yet. We transferred two embryos, but we don't know if both embryos implanted, or if one implanted and divided. So after the girls are born we'll have to get a test to find out for sure.