Life Doesn't Always Play Out The Way You Think It Will

Well, it's been a few years since my last update, and today someone asked me to start writing a blog about our current experiences, and I thought I'd oblige.

First, an update on our 2010 pregnancy:  While the reproductive endocrinologist agreed with the coordinator at his office that my lab results indicated I likely had a multiple pregnancy, when we first saw the heartbeat, there was just one little baby in there.  Unfortunately, four months into our pregnancy I went in for a standard ob/gyn appointment and the doctor couldn't find a heartbeat.  I was diagnosed with a missed miscarriage, and scheduled for a D&C several days later.

Lesson Learned:  When you go in for your ob/gyn appointments, take your partner or a friend if you can.  I was alone at the appointment and it really would have been better to have someone with me.

The day the D&C was scheduled, I took the bus to the hospital (my husband was at work at that hospital that day and I just wanted to take the bus anyway).  That morning, I had started to have some bleeding and some pretty severe cramping.  I was admitted to the hospital and sent to a room to wait my turn downstairs on the surgery floor.  They did knock me out, but before they did I asked them to do genetic testing to find out what happened to the baby.

Important Note:  If you want to know what went wrong, you have to ask for the genetic testing before the D&C.  If you don't, they will likely put the baby into a solution that will prevent them from doing the testing at all.

About two days after the D&C, my husband and I left town for a week and went to Whistler, BC.  This was helpful to us in terms of just having some space away from everything to process what had happened.  Upon our return, I received a call from my ob/gyn letting me know that our baby had been a girl and that she had had Turner's syndrome, a disorder that some children can make it to term with, but most do not.  It felt better to know what had happened and to have the complete "story" of our baby.  I knew there was nothing I had done or could have done differently to change the results.

We still had five embryos left from the IVF process, so we did go through the transfer process for all of those embryos, and none of them took.  We could have gone ahead from the beginning, but we decided to change tacks and move on to adoption.