Chapter Forty One: Reflections

Don’t know what your future looks like and having trouble making plans for it? Not living the life you want? Feeling a financial strain? Are you a bit depressed? Did a baby or toddler in line at the grocery store trigger you emotionally? I bet you can answer yes to at least a couple of …

Chapter Forty: Greedy for More

After years of coping with infertility and exploring all possible avenues to expand our family, I was richly blessed with my daughter, Ruby.  She radiates all the beauty of life and I am addicted to her. Everything about her makes my life great. My life is very different from the one I had a couple …

Chapter Thirty Nine: Successful Implantation

***To anyone reading my blog who is struggling with Infertility: this is your trigger warning. I am not at all offended if you choose to stop reading. Take care of yourself in whatever way is right for you.*** Brendin and I are very happy to announce we have received our very first positive pregnancy test …

Canadian Infertility Awareness Week: 2018

It is currently infertility awareness week in Canada so I thought I’d do a post in honour of it. Canada doesn’t put out a theme for the week but our neighbors to the south do. Their theme this year is flip the script. So what’s the script we’re flipping? I’m sure most people will think …

Chapter Thirty Eight: Here we go Again

Our Embryos from anonymous egg donation have finally arrived in Winnipeg and we are so happy to be able to now move on to the next steps in the process. It will take until May before my body is ready to receive the first embryo. First I had to be put on medication in order …

A Guide for Friends and Family

I’ve decided to branch out from my sequential chapter style blog posts to do something different. This is more of an FYI post to help give some tips and answer some infertility etiquette questions. I’ve also included a glossary of basic medical terms and adoption language to help you feel confident when talking about infertility …

Chapter Thirty Seven: Special Delivery

So you thought waiting for that cool flying drone you ordered off Amazon was hard? We’ve  been waiting months just for a ‘ready for shipment’ status on our embryos. We’ve sent them hoards of money for payment and vials of sperm months ago for a custom creation. Our embryos are now FINALLY ready to ship. …

Chapter Thirty Six: Active File

We now have an active file at Adoption Options! This means we have completed all necessary paperwork and scrutiny to become parents through adoption. Birth parents can walk into Adoption Options any day and choose us. Typically adoptive parents are picked when pregnancies are around the six month mark which gives about three months notice, …

Chapter Thirty Five: Winding Up

Today I underwent a saline sonohysterogram in preparation for more frozen embryo transfers this year. The international IVF program we signed up for requires this procedure to be done before undergoing embryo transfers. Basically, the doctor pushed a bunch of salt water up into my uterus, but instead of using my uterus like a weapon …

Chapter Thirty Four: Menopause and Mistletoe

Christmas is a holiday focused on what makes life truly worth living - Love, Peace and Joy. For many people those words conjure up images of spending time with family. Commercials take advantage of that, tugging at your heartstrings with children in footie pajamas tiptoeing downstairs with wide eyes. Sometimes they show new mothers rocking …

Chapter Thirty Three: Jump-start of Hope

We’ve picked a new egg donor and I’m really happy about who we’ve chosen. I don’t know her name or even what country she lives in but she has given me a rejuvenation of hope and I am grateful to her. She’s quite young with beautiful green eyes, a lovely smile and a bachelor’s degree. …

Chapter Thirty Two: Body Break

Well, it’s pretty clear that lately I haven’t been “keeping fit and having fun” like those terrible lifestyle commercials from the 90's. The next few months are my chance to regain a bit of healthy balance and I’m actually really looking forward to starting up exercising again. I never thought I’d ever be saying that …

Chapter Thirty One: Falling Far From The Tree?

I wonder if my child will take after me - like the old phrase about apples falling close to the tree. Does it only apply in reference to genetic children? The last embryo with genetic ties to me (made using eggs donated by my sister) has now been transferred from the lab to my body. …

Chapter Thirty: Double Double Toil and Trouble

Well I guess you could say the witch's brew of hormones and magic didn't work. I am still not pregnant after the double embryo transfer last month. We are heartbroken; a feeling we have grown very accustomed to month after month. I try my best to protect my heart, but the sting is still incredibly …

Chapter Twenty Nine: Strapped in for the Ride

This morning was another ultrasound in preparation for yet another frozen embryo transfer. The doctor seemed very happy with my endometrial lining at 9.3mm and our decision to transfer two embryos on Sunday. Prednisone was added to my protocol today as well. It's meant more for women with recurring miscarriage to lower your immunity so …

Chapter Twenty Eight: Relax! It’s Just a Scratch…

The endometrial scratch I had a few days ago was quite a bit worse than last time but maybe that's a good thing. I had a different doctor this time and she really scraped me up. Hopefully that translates to a super awesome endometrial lining next month.  While she was shoving a catheter into my …

Chapter Twenty Seven: Running out of Hope

We're now at four failed embryo transfers, three and a half years of trying, two donor IVF cycles and about $40,000 into this infertility wasteland. I think it's legitimate to say I'm an infertility marathoner. Lately I've been coming to terms with accepting I will probably never become pregnant. I thought the hardest part of …

Chapter Twenty Six: Waiting out the Storm

I often hear comments from friends and family telling me not to give up. I'm almost ready for my forth embryo transfer and they are trying to encourage me to keep on going with treatments, and comfort me by saying one of them will surely work out. We are definitely going to use all four …

Chapter Twenty Five: Stuck in the Infertility Flowchart

You know the charts I mean, where each step is a box and you follow the arrows to the next box? This flowchart is supposed to end with pregnancy.  At first my wait was exciting; thinking I could be pregnant in just a few months. Then it turned to frustration waiting to see if I …

Chapter Twenty Four: Adding to the Freezer

Alongside the two embryos we  still have in the fertility freezer from December 2016's IVF, are 3 more embryos (all grade B). These new embryos are the result of retrieving 8 more eggs from my sister, Rosalie. It has been an especially nerve wracking and heart-wrenching few weeks as the follicles(eggs) grew in my sister's …

Chapter Twenty Three: Musings On Motherhood

I wonder when you can legitimately be called a Mother. The obvious answer is when you have a child, but is that all there is to it?  Some parents never conceive, choosing adoption to expand their family. Some parents lose children to accidents or disorders, yet I still think they are Moms and Dads after …

Chapter Twenty Two: Twin Appointments

We found out that the IVF cycle my sister was supposed to be a part of in early June was overbooked. Our two unideal options left were to do another egg donation immediately, or wait until September. We ended up cancelling or rearranging almost everything planned for the next two weeks (dentist, babysitting, family trip …

Chapter Twenty One: Another Coin Toss

This month's frozen embryo transfer also failed. It's easy enough to flip a coin and get tails twice I guess, but this frigging coin is starting to feel rigged. The flips are high stakes: we have inputted an average of 4 months of time - one month of which is my body feeling absolutely shitty, …

Chapter Twenty: Try Try Again

I am into my third month of hormones and ultrasounds for an embryo transfer. The first month was cancelled due to unexplained bleeding and the second month's embryo failed to properly implant. This month's try was threatened with being cancelled due to sickness, but I ended up feeling better by the transfer date so we …

Chapter Nineteen: Silver Linings

There is always something positive that can be found even in a negative situation. It's one of those sayings that is easy to say, yet much more difficult to live. I've been trying to implement this strategy in order to keep my sanity over the past 3 years (sometimes poorly and other times quite well), …

Chapter Eighteen: Schrodinger’s Embryo

Time passes very slowly between an embryo transfer and a definitive pregnancy test. This expanse of time, commonly known in the fertility world as the two week wait, drives everyone waiting through it (including me) completely up the wall. If you spend any amount of time on google researching pregnancy or infertility, which is what …

Chapter Seventeen: Legally Mine

One of the prerequisites for our egg donor IVF was to have a legal contract drawn up. One section of this contract caught my attention in particular. I had assumed that since my sister was my substitute (and required to give up all rights to them) that the rights would transfer to me. They don't. …

Chapter Sixteen: Not Counting Chickens

Everyone around me seems to be excited but I'm not. People genuinely seem alarmed and perplexed when I tell them I'm not. Let me explain. I am scared. To be clear, I'm not scared of becoming pregnant. I'm scared of not becoming pregnant. It's thinking about all the effort, time, sacrifice and money put into the …

Chapter Fifteen: One Step Back

    So last month was a wash. The fluid sack ended up being a regular cyst and not the follicle we were hoping for. We decided to postpone the embryo transfer due to the unexplained bleeding I was  having, since we want to give each embryo the best possible environment for implantation. I was surprisingly; very …

Chapter Fourteen: Thick and Lush

No, it's not my hair that I'm referring to. My dear friend and coworker, Cindy, sent me the text: "Woohoo. May your lining be thick and lush." It was the best response imaginable I could have received to the text,  "I've finally started my period." She kept her enthusiasm  aimed at the stage I'm at …

Chapter Thirteen: Frozen in Time

Ok! So we are doing in-vitro fertilization with my sister's eggs, which have been combined with my husband's sperm. Then we stuck them in a high-tech freezer to wait until my body is ready to (hopefully) grow them into little humans. Wow! It's a little mind-blowing how all of this is possible.  If I had …

Chapter Twelve: Sparks of Life!

After the egg retrieval, my sister was doing exceptionally well and was very hungry. We went to our favourite breakfast place: Cora's. She surprised us by devouring a full adult meal complete with peanut butter and coffee (both things she was told to avoid) and didn't complain of even a tinge of nausea. Awesome! Next …

Chapter Eleven: Get Cracking!

  Second time was a charm. No cyst and good blood hormone levels allowed us to finally get some traction on egg growing. There wasn't much excitement at this attempt... very guarded optimism is how I would sum up the feeling. We got the go ahead to proceed and quickly made arrangements for me to …

Chapter Ten: Blunders

Getting rid of that diabolical cyst meant the end of another expanse of waiting; marked each time now by a corresponding trek into the city for my sister and brother-in-law. The hoops we jump though appear interminable. Sometimes I feel becoming pregnant is an unattainable goal and I should just forget about it altogether. It …

Chapter Eight: Beating Odds

The weeks passed by until we would know if we were in the 80% category of people who get to start the egg growing process. At every step of the process the odds have been in my favour that the next thing would work out. With each test and each treatment was the likelihood to …

Chapter Nine: Hopes for the Future

More than one person has asked me well-meaningly if I am ready for kids. It seemed like a silly question. Of course I could have answered that I am financially secure, married, with a house and career. Somehow I thought it would be naive to answer yes. Is anyone ever truly ready for all the …

Chapter Seven: Setbacks

On the ultrasound they found a cyst.  We had to wait for bloodwork to tell us if it was estrogen producing (we would have to wait for it to go away) or not estrogen producing (we could proceed and they would drain it at retrieval time). It turned out to be producing estrogen. Shit! They …

Chapter Six: Impatiently Waiting

Everyone was telling me the process was going really fast. It was good to have time to save money for the treatments, but I would’ve gladly taken on debt to get it done faster. I think they quoted us $12,000-$15,000 but actually it’s more than that once you consider lawyers, drugs etc. I never really …

Chapter Five: Asking a Big Favour

The doctor at the fertility clinic and my husband both did their best to keep my hopes in check with reality. I was told heart wrenching statistics: among them an 80% drop out rate for potential egg donor candidates. My sister and her husband might not be willing to commit to such a large favour …

Chapter Four: Grief

In one way I was relieved. No more chore sex, the pressure was off and it had become a toxic strain on our marriage. In another way I was devastated. It wasn’t logical to think my eggs would create a child more precious to me than another woman’s eggs. In my head I knew that …

Chapter Three: Figuring it Out

Then we were referred to a fertility clinic, which took another 4 months or so. More tests: a radioactive dye shot up my reproductive tract to see if my tubes were open, a repeat of my husband’s sperm test, more bloodwork. More drugs: another increase in the Letrozole, plus Metformin (in case it was Polycystic …

Chapter Two: Something is Wrong

My cycles were pretty wonky and I chalked it up to my body readjusting after having the I.U.D (contraceptive intrauterine device) taken out, but then they got wonkier. When I started getting what I thought were hot flashes I made an appointment. I was worried it was early menopause and made sure to tell my …

Chapter One: Deciding to Parent

As a child I remember saying that I would deliberately adopt babies from around the world to create my family, and wondered why more people didn’t adopt as their first choice. I never thought about how expensive or stressful it would be to do that. Anyways, that was before my natural instinct kicked in. Not …

I’m Blogging

One day I just sat down and started to write. I wanted to document what I was going through trying to become pregnant. I found it helpful to write it out and started sharing it with people close to me. It was a kind of therapy. Well here I am with my first post because …