Darla, traveled to the Czech Republic for donor egg IVF and is today’s guest blogger. This post does contain an image of a pregnancy announcement as well as talks about loss. Thanks, Darla, for sharing your story!
An Unexpected Journey
“Journey” has always been the word I’ve used to describe our battle with infertility. (I’m also very deliberate in the use of the term “our battle” because, while it’s most likely that my eggs were the culprit, I can never forget that my husband was by my side through it all, and he is just as battle-worn as I am.)
Our journey to growing our family was an emotional one that tried to takes its toll on our relationship; a physical one that definitely took a toll on my body; a spiritual one that found me begging on my knees for a reason that a loving God would put us through this.
And for us, it was a literal journey. Practically to the other side of the world. But more on that shortly.
When we were told our best chance for success was using donor eggs, we considered it for a brief moment, but realized to do that here at our home clinic would require years of saving, and of waiting. We thought about living childless, but my heart could only take that for about, oh, a day. We looked into embryo adoption, and even had a wonderful and selfless woman reach out to us and offer us her embryos, but it quickly became apparent that it was very important for my husband to feel connected to our children in some way.
Our research into donor egg IVF led us to something we first brushed off as crazy: traveling abroad for an IVF cycle. The number one place to go for donor egg IVF cycles abroad is the Czech Republic. So we laughed and said, “Thanks but no thanks” to that idea, and kept researching. And our research kept bringing us back to a trip to the Czech Republic.
A dear friend of mine, who I met through an online infertility community, was dealing with a similar situation to ours at the time. She texted me one day and asked if I’d heard about this Czech Republic thing. I said I had, but before I could say we just weren’t on board, she said, “I think we’re gonna do that!” Her excitement about it was infectious, so I asked her to share her research.
Before I knew it, I was emailing clinics in Prague and other Czech cities to ask for more information about their program. My husband was intrigued, too, and he started making spreadsheets to compare stats. And one night, I sat in a bubble bath and he sat on the floor next to me. We ranked all the stats of the clinics abroad, and our own clinic in Texas. We averaged the rankings. And we found our clinic. I’m pretty sure I cried the next day as I emailed the coordinator at Zlin IVF and asked for an available transfer date in February. I KNOW I cried when she responded with the date that our babies would be put into my womb: February 9, 2016.
The time leading up to the trip was a crazy mess of coordinating with clinics here for meds and monitoring, planning a two-and-a-half-week jaunt through Europe, and talking friends and family down as they mildly freaked out about what we were doing.
The trip itself was a whirlwind. We went to places we’d only ever dreamed of going: Florence, Vienna, Prague. We were standing outside one of the most famous classical music venues in Europe, the Musikverein in Vienna, when we got the call that our donor had 12 mature eggs retrieved and 9 had fertilized. I’ll never forget standing in the rain with my husband outside this gorgeous building and crying over these embryos. We’d never gotten this far before. And though that number was down to only two by the day of transfer, we were so grateful for this chance, and we had faith in our two “little embryos that could.”
Two days after returning from the trip of a lifetime, I told my husband over dinner at one of our favorite restaurants that I’d caved, had tested, and he was going to be a daddy. A week and a half later, we found out that both our little ones had decided to snuggle in!
And now, we take each day as it comes and remind ourselves that we’re farther each day than we’ve been before. Being pregnant after an infertility battle is a battle in and of itself, but like I tell myself daily, “Today I am pregnant, and I love my babies.”
Update:
I wrote this blog originally back at the end of March when I was 10 weeks pregnant. We found out not long after I wrote this that we were expecting two little girls who we named Olivia Adele (baby A) and Catherine Sophia (baby B). We spent 14 glorious weeks as the parents of twins, 11 weeks as the parents of our twin girls. We had dreams for them, we had a picture of our life as a family of four.
And then, sadly, the unthinkable happened. At our 20-week scan, we found out our precious Catie-bug was very, very sick. She hadn’t developed normally – she had an encephalocele on the back of her skull (which turned out to be an open neural tube defect), a very large cleft lip/palate, small brain structures, and one doctor classified her head size as being in line with microcephaly. We were devastated to say goodbye to little Cate on June 22, 2016, a day shy of 22 weeks’ gestation. I am now carrying my sweet little angel and our survivor, Liv, and hoping and praying we make it to October with no further issues. While our hearts are broken for our loss, the excitement we felt at finally finding a way to become parents and our joy in our daughters is not dampened. This is all just a part of our very unexpected journey.