Tag: travel

Post-donor egg IVF cycle wisdom

~ femmephysicist ~ Leave a comment

Three weeks ago we found out that our 4th IVF attempt — and first attempt with donor eggs — had failed. In the week that followed, we had two different international visitors (from Australia and the UK!), which was a fun and well-timed distraction. Sadly, they eventually had to go back to their respective countries, and their departures also coincided with the arrival of a particularly unpleasant menstrual period (no doubt due to all the meds). As I lay on the couch with a hot bean bag on my crotch for the second day in a row, I finally had some time to reflect further on this last cycle.

Multiple people have commented on how quickly I was able to bounce back from this last failed attempt and focus on the the positives. I don’t want to give the false impression that any of this is easy, so I’ll tell you my secret why: it’s because the first three failed cycles were much, much harder. Those were the cycles where it became clear that we would never have children with my eggs…where people would tell me ‘it would happen eventually’, and I had to smile and nod, knowing they were wrong. Let’s all take a minute and be thankful that I wasn’t blogging yet back then, because it would have been one nonstop sob-fest.

That’s not to say that this recent cycle was all sunshine and lollipops. It was obviously hard too…but in a different way. As I was trying to figure out how to explain it, I got a nice message from fellow donor-egg-IVF mama Lauren of The Trying Times, who helped me put my finger on why.

The thing is, making the decision to use donor eggs is already a massive leap — it’s something that no one can really fully understand unless they’ve been through it. It’s a trauma that requires it’s own grieving process. After all, you’re giving up on a lifelong dream — what should have been a given for a heterosexual couple like us — of having kids that are half your partner and half you. When you do finally give up on your own chances and make that leap, you sort of feel like you’ve already paid your dues. Then when it still doesn’t work, it feels doubly unfair. It’s like, not only did you fail IVF with your own eggs, but now you have to go through the whole drawn-out process again with someone else’s.

The silver lining

It’s taken me a long time to find a silver lining in all this, but as I waited for the microwave to finish heating my crotch-warmer™️ for the fourth time in as many hours, it came to me: we can finally go on vacation.

You see, once we started the IVF phase of our 5-year (and counting) ‘journey’, it became a race against the clock to knock me up before my ovaries completely kicked the bucket. Even when we gave up on my own eggs, we jumped right into planning our donor egg cycle due to the timing of our egg donor Marie’s summer vacation. Between all of this and my busy work schedule, it means we haven’t had a ‘proper’ (i.e. >2 week, European-style) vacation in over two years. And of course, juggling all of this along with an uber-competitive career is exactly why I so desperately need a vacation.

Now that we’re using donor eggs, it totally changes the game. In particular, we’re fortunate in that there’s no evidence of any additional problems with my uterus or my husband’s sperm. Obviously I’d rather not wait ’til I’m in dentures to pop out a kid, but now when I close my eyes, I’m no longer terrorized by graphs of egg-quality nose-diving with age. If none of the embryos from Marie’s eggs work, our backup plan is to use an anonymous donor in Spain, where I’m sure we can find some fertile 22-year old who gets pregnant from merely being sneezed on. As a result, I feel a lot less pressure to make every month count, so we’ve decided to sit the next cycle out and finally take a long-overdue vacation.

Specifically, we’ll be heading to the south of France (near Bordeaux), and then Corfu, where I plan on lounging around various exotic beaches for hours on end. I’ll also be doing my best to avoid Facebook, where back-to-school photos are in full swing, and my mind can’t help but play the “Was that kid alive when we started trying” game. We’ll be going with our favorite travel buddy, the lovely Louise, who makes every trip about 10x more fun. I love our vacations with Louise — we’ve been dog-sledding in Norway, bathed elephants in Thailand, and have had countless other adventures in foreign lands that were made even more adventurous thanks to Louise’s unwavering faith in Google Maps (I’m looking at you, Cretan goat trail). I also acknowledge that we wouldn’t have gotten to take half these trips if we’d gotten pregnant when we originally wanted to. So I’m planning on enjoying the hell out of this next adventure, and we’ll wait and see what happens the month after.

All systems go…with one hiccup

~ femmephysicist ~ 2 Comments

In my last post, I talked about how our friend Marie had been approved as our egg donor, but contingent on three pending genetic tests. Those test results weren’t expected until today (25 June), which was basically the last possible moment in order to keep our timeline for donor egg in-vitro fertilization (IVF) on track. Well, our Belgian egg donation nurse, Bernadette, worked her magic again, and we got the test results back already on Friday 22 June (voila!). The same day, I had a blood test, followed by an ultrasound on Saturday to make sure I’m ready for the first injection. All of the tests came back clear, which means we are officially all-systems-go for a July 2018 egg donation.

I know that probably sounds like something in this process actually went smoothly. But you should also know by now that I enjoy (according to my husband) “doing everything the hard way”. This is why I got my PhD in a competitive field, and why I voluntarily moved to a foreign country…twice. This is also why I decided to accept a work invitation to speak at a conference in the US this week, right in the middle of this whole process.

It shouldn’t have mattered, or at least that’s what I thought. I knew I needed to have an injection during the week I was away, but I’ve already given myself at least 50 injections over the course of our three ‘normal’ (non-donor-egg) IVF cycles. I knew I could get a doctor’s note to fly with the medication and needles, and I figured I could just inject myself with a large dose of hormones in the morning and then go chair the plenary session like the modern working woman I am. Easy-peasy, right?

Wrong.

Literally the day after booking my flights (which I’d already waited til the last minute to do), I called Bernadette about picking up my injection, and she informed me that it was not necessary to pick it up, because this particular injection had to be done by my doctor…in Belgium. Apparently this injection was intra-muscular — not subcutaneous* — and it was very easy to do it wrong. She said it was ok if I wanted to do it myself, but that I had to agree to accept the consequences if I did it incorrectly. And the consequence was a canceled IVF cycle.

To go or not to go?

A mild panic ensued, where I briefly considered canceling my whole trip. That probably sounds like the obvious solution, but I’ve already canceled so many work trips for IVF, and I really didn’t want to cancel yet another. Then I considered trying to call a doctor’s office in the US city I was visiting, but I had had previous bad experiences with medical care crossing international borders. I highly doubted that if I called up a random US doctor, they would agree to inject me with some foreign (literally, including the box and directions) medicine.

Next I called up a Dutch doctor friend, who offered to help me practice stabbing the MASSIVE needle into my thigh before I left, but I was still worried I’d mess it up by not stabbing it in far enough, or too far (…is that a thing?) Then another friend had a suggestion: did I know anyone attending the conference who was a doctor? (Technically we’re all doctors, but not the useful kind…)

Luckily, I remembered that one of my fellow conference attendees is originally from the city I’ll be visiting. I emailed to explain my predicament and ask if she knew any doctors. Lo-and-behold, her childhood best friend is a doctor, and she still lives in the area. After some more emailing back and forth, this friend-of-a-friend agreed to help me!

So this is how it has come about that tomorrow, after I’m done chairing my session, I will take a taxi to the home of a woman I’ve never met before and have her stab me with a very large needle.

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*FYI, ‘Intra-muscular’ means the medication needs to be injected into a muscle rather than just under the skin. There was actually a whole separate confusion over whether this was still the case if I got the prescription filled in the Netherlands (where I live) rather than Belgium, as the medication is apparently slightly different (because again…hardest way possible!). The box actually said it could be done both ways, but confusingly, there was no subcutaneous needle included in the package. After multiple phone calls to various medical professionals by my (invaluable) Dutch doctor friend — including to the actual manufacturer — we eventually decided it was a safer bet just to do it intramuscularly. (On a related note, I recommend everyone befriend a medical doctor.)