The Fragility of Life

Each time I feel my girls wiggle around in my belly, I am reminded of how lucky I am to be pregnant. I was getting out of bed yesterday in an attempt to make it to the bathroom and Geoff just smiled at me and my belly and said "you have two human beings in your belly" -- "that's just so amazing..." It is amazing, and still so hard to envision that sometime in the next 6 weeks, those humans will be out of me and hopefully in our arms.

While the idea of two humans inside of me is amazing, it also reminds me that life is so fragile. Late last night and early this morning, I wasn't feeling the girls wiggle around as much as I usually do; so of course -- I worried. I don't think I will ever get over the worry of losing these girls during pregnancy, until they are safely in our arms. I have worried about them from the moment we received our first picture of them in the embryonic state -- a picture that not all parents can proudly include in the child's baby books.

Last night Geoff and I watched "Law and Order Special Victims Unit" -- we don't usually watch this show, but caught a preview for it a few days ago, and heard that it involved a crime at a fertility clinic, so I made it a point to watch it. Basically, the storyline was that someone stole a cryo tank full of frozen embryos. It ended up being a publicity stunt by a group that wanted to promote the fact that human life begins at conception and that these frozen embryos deserve a shot at life rather than being destroyed or donated to research after their parents are "done having children." The embryos did not survive the kidnapping, and many couples had to face the devastating news that they lost their future children.

Watching that episode reminded me of how Geoff and I felt after receiving the "fertilization report" after our first egg retrieval. After our first cycle, I believe we had 17 eggs retrieved, 14 were mature and 13 fertilized -- so at that point, Geoff and I were essentially parents to 13 children! It baffled us -- I felt weird knowing that 13 of our offspring were sitting in a lab just 10 miles from our home. I thought about those embryos for the next couple of days as we waited for the day 3 report. After day three, we were down to nine embryos -- I felt horrible; four of our future little children did not survive! By the time we had our transfer two days later on day five -- we had two embryos to transfer and three were going to be cyro-preserved for future use -- we had lost another five embryos. It was heartbreaking.

When undergoing IVF, I believe many of us view our embryos as our babies -- they are very much alive to us and any loss of embryos during the culture stage (the time between retrieval and transfer) is heartbreaking. Those embryos are our future children and our only chances at successfully becoming pregnant. That is why, I believe, when a couple undergoes IVF and ends up with a BFN (negative pregnancy test), it is much harder to accept than if they had tried "the old fashioned way" and not had success.

During our IVF journey we created life at least 35 times -- we had 35 living embryos for a few days that were our offspring, our future children. Of those 35, only eight of them survived long enough to be put back inside my uterus to have a chance to grow and thrive. Of the eight we transferred, only the two I carry with me today made it for the long haul. We have no frozen embryos, so we are not left with the decision of what to do with them after our daughters are born.

I often think about our little embryos that didn't make it and know that they were not "wasted" as we were doing what was necessary to achieve our dreams. I am thankful every day for the two little embryos that were strong enough to hold on and have held on for the past 31 weeks, but it is hard to overcome the fear of the fragility of life. There is nothing I can do to guarantee their safe arrival into the world, but I do feel good that they have overcome some major hurdles to come this far and we are now in the home stretch. It won't be much longer and our little girls whom we first met in the embryonic state will finally come home with us to live and thrive in their new world, outside of the womb -- and we can't wait for that day to come.