All These Years

“Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth.” ~  Menachem Begin

After all these years my hour of reckoning is near. I have recently talked to my IVF doctor and I finally found a partner that wants to be the father of my child(ren)! In the next week I will travel up to Chicago with him, at which time six of my nine eggs will be thawed and his sperm will fertilize them. The potential embryos will then be frozen (yeah, these kids have to come out of two thaws!) because - from my unnderstanding - the genetic testing that needs to be done on the embryos to ensure they will be viable for implantation takes a couple of weeks.

So let me re-hash all the miracles that need to take place in order for it to seem as if I got one miracle... a baby!

First miracle, my just-shy of 46 year old eggs have to be good, i.e., they need to be normal and viable. Second miracle, those eggs which have now been frozen eight years need to come out of the thaw intact and remain viable. Third miracle, my eggs need to be fertilized with healthy, viable sperm. Fourth miracle, the resulting fertilized egg needs to be incubated to the embryo stage and remain viable going into another freeze. Fifth miracle, the embryos need to be ascertained by genetic testing  to be healthy - genetically viable. Sixth miracle, my 55 year old post-menopausal body needs to be healthy enough to receive the embryos upon implantation so that they can begin to grow inside me. Seventh miracle - and this one relates to the sixth miracle - I need to overcome my own DNA’s propensity for miscarriage because of having both the MTHFR gene mutation and being homozygous for COMT 2. Eighth miracle, I need to carry my healthy fetus to full term, or near enough, to give birth and have my child survive and thrive. I feel like I’m missing several other miracle parts, but these are definitely some of the bigger miracles to getting that “one” miracle.

Let’s get this party started!

Small Packages

Miracles sometimes come in small packages, but to this 48 year old mother and 50 year old father, it probably felt like they got the biggest gift package in the whole world!