It’s been quite a week for us on the surrogacy front.
Earlier this week we got the news from our clinic that our surrogate’s endomitrial lining didn’t appear to be optimally ready for an embryo transfer. The clinic asked us to pick a new surrogate. (It feels like we’ve picked so many surrogates and egg donors at this point. Lordy.) They sent us two options, and one surrogate candidate stood out right away, both from her photos and her statistics. We e-mailed our selection back right away.
On Thursday we got the news that our egg donor had successfully made her donation. The eggs were fertilized with Matt’s sperm, and the fertilized embryo transfer was set for Saturday (today) in Mumbai, which is 9.5 hours ahead of New York time.
Last night, after midnight, as things were progressing in Mumbai on Saturday morning, Matt got a call on his cell phone from a number he didn’t immediately recognize.
It was the clinic.
Apparently the embryo fertilization process went very well. This time they had ten (ten!) fertilized embryos. They set aside four for implantation, but they were calling to find out if we wanted to freeze the other six embryos. That would give us the option to use them on another round of IVF if this one doesn’t work out. If this round does work out, it gives us the option to keep the embryos frozen for a number of years in case we want a sibling (or siblings) for our child(ren) that will be 100% genetically related.
Matt relayed this information to me as the call progressed.
“Give me just a minute,” Matt said into the phone and then covered the speaker. “It costs 60,000 rupees to do it. Do you think we should?”
(The quick math: 60,000 rupees is about $1,090.)
My brain tried to take in all this new information and make an informed decision.
There are so many decisions to make when it comes to surrogacy.
“Can we call you right back?” Matt asked.
We talked it over. We crunched numbers. It would save us money to freeze the embryos if a third round of IVF became necessary. And, hell, we were already set to spend more than a million rupees on the whole surrogacy process. What’s another 60,000 rupees at this point? On top of that, we really liked the egg donor and wanted to work with her genetic material again.
We breathed for a moment and then called back with our decision.
“We’ll do it,” Matt said.
At almost the same time that we made the decision to freeze the remaining embryos, we got the e-mail from the clinic with the embryo transfer results.
We have done the embryo transfer into your surrogate today. It was a smooth transfer procedure. Please find attached the cycle summary and the embryo pictures. The surrogate’s pregnancy test will be on 4 October 2012. The report of the b-HCG test [the pregnancy test] will be available by the next day. Our clinical team will keep you updated with the result.
So, we have an egg donor we’re excited about, a surrogate we feel good about, and ten fertilized embryos, with four implanted and six saved for later.
But, the bottom line? The embryos are in the womb!
Matt put things well on his Facebook wall: “The embryos have been implanted! Now begins the most stressful 15 days of my life before the first blood test to determine if we are pregnant. Kinda amazing that today is also the day that we had originally scheduled for our wedding… we may have a wedding night baby after all :-P”
Ah, yes. September 22, 2012. When we got engaged in June 2011, that was the original date we’d picked out for our wedding. Eventually we decided we wanted to be married sooner, and in a much smaller, more intimate wedding. We selected the third anniversary of the day we met, which just happened to be 11/11/11, and also happened to be a Saturday.
So, here we are on what would have been our wedding day, with the news that the embryos are in our surrogate’s womb, hopefully finding a nice, warm, quiet spot to latch and hang out for a good 40 weeks, potentially making us dads in June 2013.
The September 22 thing has to be a good omen, right?
We’re optimistic. We’re excited. We’re still being realistic, and are aware of the odds, but we still feel good about this round of IVF.
That photo above of the fertilized embryo may be the first-ever photo of our child. (Or children!)
Isn’t he/she cute? 😉
–Josh
New Dads on the Block 