IVF encore

When Jax was a year old, I realized that if I didn’t take drastic measures, he was going to be a very spoiled little boy.  My options were to either reign in Mimi, who had gone jumping-over-the-moon-gaga over her first grandchild, or to have another baby to give the little Bean prince some competition.  Both solutions presented problems.  Reigning in Mimi would be like dragging George Clooney to the altar.  I had a better chance of trying to have another baby, and that didn’t look so good—I was almost 41.

My fertility doctor was very nice.  Hell, I’d be nice to me too if I were him.  I made him look good.  (Fertility docs have to report their IVF stats to the CDC, and I was a success stat, not to mention that he made a small fortune off of my fertility attempts.)  He told me that I could do IVF with my own eggs until I turned 43, but if I was serious, I needed to try at 41. 

When I mentioned having a second baby to Papa, he became nervous and withdrawn and gulped down rotgut vodka martinis out of a pickle jar.  I knew that if I told him I was going forward with the idea, he would just start foaming at the mouth about something that very well might not happen.  I’m very intuitive in that way.  So I did what any good daughter would do—I planned the IVF during his annual bike ride across country.

On my first IVF, my extracurricular time was devoted to getting pregnant—detoxification and purification.  I gave up all things good (caffeine, wine and sugar), which just shows how desperate I was to have a baby.  I ate a lot of salads and took an assortment of vitamins and herbal supplements, and I visited an acupuncturist weekly. I did daily shots of wheatgrass juice, I visualized getting pregnant, and I did something that I read about in Eastern medicine called femoral massage where I put pressure on the femoral artery to cause blood to build up in the ovaries to nourish the developing eggs.

IVF isn’t for the faint of heart.  It is, as a friend once warned me, the monster of fertility treatments.  There’s blood to be drawn, ultrasounds to be performed, nurses and doctors to be consulted.  There are phone calls and emails and there is a lot of medicine, and most of it has to be injected, and there are drug protocols and drug protocol adjustments.  There’s the harvesting (the egg retrieval), the fertilization, the fertilization report, the incubation period, the embryo report, and the transfer of the embryos to the uterus.  Then there’s the two-day bed rest, followed by a period of waiting to pee on a stick to see if within the short time of one month you’ve just blown 15 grand and any hope you ever had of salvaging your sanity.

As it was I could barely keep up with my 18-month old Bean and my 40-hour job, let alone maintain the rigorous schedule of meds and doctor visits.  Sticky notes decorated my house and alarms rang at all hours, and then there was a scare when I forgot to re-refridgerate some medicine.  As for detoxification and purification—there was no time.  I did give up caffeine and I cut my wine consumption down to an occasional glass.  The difference in the two cycles was remarkable.

On the first IVF I produced 18 eggs.  This time, I produced 13.  On the first IVF, 11 eggs fertilized.  On the second, 11 again.  On the first IVF, Bob, the embryologist, opened the incubator after three days to find two 8-celled embryos; I had hoped for better.  On the second, there were SIX of those puppies growing, and so he closed them back up for two more days to see who would fare best. 

When it came time to transfer, two of the embryos had made it to the blastocyst stage (100 cells), and another one was coming along. Blastocysts are hardy little suckers, and I had to make a decision about how many to transfer.  I could not afford twins.  I did not want twins.  But my chances of getting pregnant at almost 42 were much better if I transferred both.  Mimi was no help.  She refused to advise me, and my doctor said he wanted to do what I wanted to do.

“There isn’t room in the Honda for three kids,” I finally said.  “Let’s just transfer one.”

So we did and I gave up that occasional glass of wine because I might be pregnant, and I tried to forget about everything which was not hard to do with Jax Bean running around. 

Like I said, blasts are hardy little suckers.  At 2 a.m. on July 4, I peed on a stick.  It was positive.

I was with Bean… again.