365 Days Old

I’ve been getting a little sentimental recently. It started when the lovely Waiting for Bumble came to San Diego recently to do DEIVF at the same clinic we used. We’d never met before, but I felt like I was greeting an old friend. Over the days that she and her man were here, just three weeks shy of a year later, I relived our own DEIVF experience — with a baby in my arms. (May Bumble be the subject of a similar blog post next February!)

♥

A year ago today was one of the most nerve-wracking of my life. By all accounts, our donor wasn’t responding to her stims as well as she normally did. One nurse later confessed she seriously considered cancelling the cycle. A couple of readers freaked me out by saying I’d be lucky to get five eggs total.

And then the day of retrieval came. February 20th 2014. On the way back from the clinic, DH and I went via Mitsuwa, a Japanese supermarket, where we ordered lunch. I was waiting for my chicken katsu don when the call came from embryology. I scrabbled around in my bag, where is my fucking phone, and it stopped ringing. Yep, the lab had just called and I’d missed them. I cursed the skies as I stared at the green phone icon, willing the red circle to appear to show I had a voicemail.

After a minute, there it was.

It was a long voicemail. I pressed play and tried to relay the info to DH as efficiently and as discreetly as possible — not easy above the loud lunchtime murmur.

Fifty-five eggs.. 41 mature! … More than 30, need to freeze some… Need to make a decision now… let them know before 3pm.

Fifty-five eggs! We had so many we were in a position to freeze some. Say what? I never dreamed of this! Nellie and our RE’s team had pulled through.

We looked at the time. It was a bit before 2pm, we had about an hour to consider how many eggs we wanted to inseminate and how many to freeze. Of all the problems we had anticipated, we never thought we’d have this very nice one! I began to laugh, with tears in my eyes. Somehow, with this many eggs, we surely would be parents one day.

I stepped outside to call back the embryologist and ask for more information. I remember staring at my feet as they circle a spot in a flower bed in the parking lot. The curb’s red paint was peeling and faded and the earth was dry.

And then it hit me. I began sobbing on the phone, actual tears of joy that rolled down my cheeks. I’ve never cried with so much happiness and relief before. One of those little eggs was going to become our baby this year. It was a momentous day for all sorts of reasons. One was, I dared dream about the future again and speculate where we’d be a year later.

One Year On

Mentally, I’m sleep-deprived. I have intense moments of inadequacy (I’m in the middle of writing another post about that) and longer moments of feeling completely, fucking overwhelmed. I jiggle V on my lap, against my chest in our Boba wrap, or nurse her as I eat, write blog posts, do paid work. She is a very easy-going baby as long as she’s being held, but she also has the attention span of a goldfish. Lordy, though, I wish she’d nap in her crib during the day and give me more than two hours of nighttime sleep at a stretch.

Physically, I’m still recovering. The area of my abdomen above my scar feels either numb or bruised. The scar itself is beginning to fade on the right, and looks a little lumpy on my left. My underarm hair, which stopped growing for a couple of months due to massive blood loss, is coming back in and requires weekly shaving. I’ve regained the colour in my face. I’m back in my jeans, albeit with muffin top. My thighs and belly are rounder and wobblier, but there is also a fullness to my usually gaunt face that I think is quite becoming. My stomach muscles (the diastasis recti, or “six-pack” muscles) are beginning to knit together again, and I’m practicing holding them in to regain my core strength. I dream of getting a weekly massage. My back is killing me, and there’s a pinch in my shoulders, over-extended from repeatedly picking up and lugging around 17+ lbs every day.

And those 17 lbs started in my body. Somehow, in spite of the million-to-one odds, I am still breastfeeding. I am beginning to understand why every doctor and nurse I’ve encountered have been flabbergasted. I have enough milk I could donate some, were it not for the blood transfusion I received at V’s birth. I admire V’s rolls. She’s a veritable Buddha girl with her fat little cheeks and chubby little boobs and chunky little thighs.

Right now she’s sleeping. I think about how strong and healthy she is, and remark to some that she’d have to be, to survive the first six days of her life in the inhospitable environment of a petrie dish. A number of embryos don’t make it past the first day, but there were these two little embies that were always slightly ahead of the rest. She was one of them. And, for whatever reason, Baby B didn’t make it. It could have just as easily been her, but it wasn’t. Whether the evolutionary survival of the fittest or a more mystical She wanted to be here explanation, it blows my mind.