Our Love Hate Relationship with IVF

We have some news. First of all, let me preface it with an interesting observation. For the most part, mine and Ian's lives were filled with fairly typical events up until a couple years ago. We got married in our early twenties, Ian went to graduate school, graduated with a good job and we bought a l'il townhouse, then we set about trying to fill it with the pitter patter of l'il feet. Yeah, you've met a lot of couples like us. Oh, oops, enter a little thing known as IVF, aka In Vitro Fertilization, in the fall of 2006.

Just so you know, IVF is a miracle procedure. It's the treatment of last resort for couples struggling to have biological children, and it has changed our lives dramatically when it got us pregnant with twins. However, like some kind of wacky sci-fi movie, this thing is not without some ugly downsides. Multiple pregnancies are one of IVF's popular and 'high risk' side effects. Our children were born waaay too early but are doing well now thankfully. We were extremely lucky. Another interesting side effect is that you become a lot more conscious of the mother's age at baby's delivery- doctors repeatedly pull out charts for you that show how increased age makes the success of IVF less likely (the closer to 18 the better, but what 18 year old needs IVF?) and the higher your age the greater the risk of birth defects. In most places 35 is the new 25, but 35 is like the new 45 in this place. So, as experienced IVFers we decided we better get on it so we could save time for one more try in a few years. But, since our last twin pregnancy was a nightmare we knew we had to get preggers with one baby. A singleton pregnancy, you know, the normal kind.

Now, a guaranteed singleton pregnancy is really tricky with IVF. Although it happens with most people it's sort of a fluke because just about everybody puts in more than one budding little embryo. Even still success rates are just under 50% at the best clinics. Most have lower than that. An IVF cycle is so emotionally, financially and physically taxing everybody will do just about anything to get it to work. I've never met anybody personally who only transferred one embryo- you just really need backup. But we did it, we transferred one embryo. It didn't work, so we tried again, and it didn't work. On our third try Dr. T told us... you know, it's only a 15% chance of having twins if we transfer two embryos. So we did it, we transferred two.

We're pregnant with twins.

I've had so many different emotions associated with this news, from sublime bliss to complete terror to major 'why me?' rage. Reactions we've gotten are along those same lines. My favorite one is my brother John who yelped for joy and told us it's the best news ever. My least favorite one was from a couple with one child who started hyperventilating.

I think the thing that's going to be hardest for us both is not going to be all the laundry and diapers from 4 non-potty trained children come fall, although that is going to be pretty horrifying. It's wondering if we're going to be able to have a healthy pregnancy after the heart wrenching experience of last time. Our kids were barely born within the realm of viability, they had surgeries and complications and lots of close calls after they came home. They continue to get some therapy and I still find it hard that they've got 'two ages.' We know what can happen with a multiples pregnancy gone wrong, and we know that we're lucky our boys are OK because we've seen much worse. On the other hand, many twin pregnancies turn out just fine.

So, after telling our doctor we weren't going to do selective reduction we're screwing up our courage from places we didn't know we had it. I have become a huge believer in the power of positive thinking, I believe focused positive narratives helped make our third cycle a success, I guess it just worked a little too well. So besides telling myself constantly that I can carry these babies to full term, every day I rest as much as I possibly can. I listen to my body and I don't try to be a hero when I feel something funny happening (this was a problem last pregnancy). Ian has been a stellar father as he's picked up the slack with the laundry, grocery shopping and cleaning. We've hired people to help us, we've gotten a much better doctor to guide us through the process, we're getting ready for strict bed rest at the beginning of June by lining up a bunch of volunteers to get us through the weeks, and we're upping our Netflix movie subscription.

Also, I've been watching a lot of 'John and Kate + 8'. It makes me feel better. They had two sets of multiples, and they got a TV show out of it.

Here's our sweet little babies. There was only room for one baby's ultrasound video here, but you can see his brother kicking him from the back. Oh yeah, did I mention we were having two boys? They're due beginning of October.