Hello!
It's been way too long! This year, by far, I took my longest Christmas season blog hiatus. In years past, I tried to put up at least one picture every now and then. Though, actually, I did pretty good about putting up pictures every now and then on the Birdseye Facebook fan page! (so go check those out to see what you missed!)
I have much to catch you up on...
Some of you long-time readers will know that this time of year, (actually pretty much around this exact date each year!), I post a once-a-year blog post about my very personal journey of infertility. I started sharing little bits of our journey on this blog two years ago, because when it's heavy on your mind, and you pretty much feel like it could sum up your life, you think about it a lot at the beginning of a new year. It weighs on you as you think of new life and the hope of what a new year could bring.
I've been looking forward to writing this post for a couple of months now. I knew I would wait until this anniversary of my blog posts from years past on this topic to update you on how we are doing in 2011.
There is only one simple way to show you...
Baby Bird is coming in August of 2011!!!! (Isn't his/her first picture adorable!) I think he/she looks so comfy and cozy, lounging in Momma's tummy. And more exciting news, we only have 4 more weeks until we'll get to drop one of his/her names, and know if it is a him or a her!!!
I am 12 weeks along right now, and I think that is such perfect timing that that fell this week, since this is the week that I normally share on this topic, and since 12 weeks is the week that people normally share their wonderful news!
We have had 3 sonos, and heard the beautiful heartbeat 3 different times. Baby Bird is growing and just a perfect little baby! Stuart and I and pretty much *everyone* that we're close with thinks this baby is a boy! Who knows why, but for whatever reason, people have their instincts on this, BUT... if you are an Old Wives Tale believer, the heart rate has consistently been very high, it's been 161, 172, and 160. So that would lean toward girl! That's been fun to have this guessing game. We are going to have the awesome new trend of a gender reveal party at our home the day we find out. The common thing to do for the party is to have the inside of a cake be dyed pink or blue, and the parents cut in to it to reveal the gender, but we want to change that up a bit. So instead, I am having my good friend come with us to the sono, and the technician will write the gender down for her, and then she is going to go buy a pink or blue gift and wrap it up. Then at the party, we are going to open the gift in front of friends and family and have it revealed that way! I'm excited about that idea because then we will have that gift to keep forever to remember that is how we found out our baby's gender.
Of course I'll share pictures from the party and share the gender on here soon after!
To tell you a bit (um, basically the entire story in detail) about how our sweet baby came to be...
It actually started one year ago, in January, I got the bug to start looking at new homes, to move. I looked and looked, and we even toured some homes in the spring, when one day it hit me, I was investing myself in this new project of looking for a home because it was something I could look forward to, and involve myself in, and try to forget about our infertility. So my husband and I realized that instead of pushing on with this new goal of moving, we should instead invest ourselves deeper in to our real dream of having a baby, and that we should look in to IVF. I never would have thought IVF was possible before then. I obviously knew that IVF existed, but I also knew how expensive it was, and how completely invasive and scientific the whole process is. Around the same time in January that I started looking for homes, I was put in touch with a woman through my mother-in-law's, best friend's, daughter's, best friend. Yeah! Talk about a God thing...
This woman tried the same fertility treatments I did in the past, with no successful pregnancy, and had now started acupuncture, and she was referred to a doctor in Dallas who specializes in IVF. This doctor, because he believes that it should not be outrageously expensive for families who have no infertility insurance coverage, but desire a child, he is literally half the cost of about 95% of reproductive specialists in the nation, and he is right here in Dallas! This new friend went through this doctor for her IVF procedure, and got pregnant, with twins!
So it was all of these events culminating that made me realize that yes, IVF was within our reach.
In April, we had a consultation with this doctor, (Dr. Le in Irving), and after much, much praying and talking with our family, and rationalizing every possible outcome, (IVF is not a guarantee!!! I couldn't fathom investing that much financially, in to a procedure for it to not work! I had to get over that fear and go on faith), we decided to start on the path to IVF.
Now this path is very, very detailed. You and your husband have to have blood work done, the woman has to be current with her annual well-woman exam, your husband has to have his reproductive abilities tested, and you have to have sonograms before you get started to look at your body, and make sure it is ready to potentially become pregnant. Well, mine wasn't ready. The doctor discovered that I had uterine polyps. This got an entirely new thought process going for me. I had to have surgery to remove the polyps, and while he was in the surgery, the doctor also found some mild endometriosis, which he helped remove. After the surgery, I asked the doctor if having the polyps could have prevented me from becoming pregnant naturally, and if removing them could possibly allow me to become pregnant. He said that certainly could be the case! So after receiving this news, and new hope of a natural conception, we made the hard decision to call off our IVF. We had already gathered the money to pay the doctor, ordered my first set of medication, not to mention emotionally prepared ourselves to get started, but even though all of that had been done, hearing that we could have fixed the problem (believing that the Lord revealed that early on so we could have another shot at naturally conceiving, or at least conceiving less-invasively!), we knew that was the right decision.
Now, in all honesty, that was very hard to walk away from IVF! With each month that passed after deciding to do that, I would think "I would have been two months pregnant now", and so on, with each new month. I knew that I wanted to give it another shot with no IVF, but at the same time, I also knew that if a natural conception didn't happen by the end of the summer, I would be ready to go back, and pick up where we left off in our IVF journey. (With having the resources to do the procedure, the amazing, affordable, Christian doctor to perform it, and friends and family supporting us, it felt like it all came together for a reason.) As my mother said, the analogy of a man stranded in the ocean, praying to God to help save him, then a smally dingy boat comes by and offers to help him, but the man turns him down, saying 'no, God is going to rescue me Himself!'. And then a few days later, a huge cruise liner ship comes by and tries to save him, and again, the man turns them away, waiting for God Himself to pick him up and rescue him. So the man ends up drowning and goes to heaven and asked God why he didn't save him, and God says "I tried, but you kept turning it down!!!"
God has His own way of helping and bringing things together for us, we have to open our eyes and see it, and seize it!
So, the summer goes by, and we are ready to get back on board with IVF. Things were perfectly lined up with having had that surgery to remove the polyps, that created a nice, cozy home in my womb waiting for a baby, but I had also been preparing my body naturally by going to acupuncture sessions since February.
We had a summer vacation planned for the mid-to last week of July to visit my family in NY, and a friend in Washington DC. Well, IVF is all about timing. It's just like any normal cycle of a woman conceiving, only with IVF, it is timed out for about 2 months in advance of when the actual procedure will take place. You have to start certain medications on very specific days, (not only that, but very specific TIMES of the day!) leading up to the procedure, and you have to be monitored by your doctor very often so he can make sure everything is on track. Well our 9 day summer vacation, (our only vacation of the year!), was so "perfectly" timed that it not only messed up having a July IVF, but an August IVF as well! After trying to think of any scenario to be able to make it happen then, (we even thought about seeing if I could take my medication with me on vacation and visiting a local doctor in Washington DC while we were there for him to do my check-ups on vacation!) we realized we just needed to let it go for that month. So, it was what it was, so we went on vacation, and just knew we would start the process later in August when the timing lined up and we enjoyed our vacation!
A small (huge to us!) miracle that took place during this time is that friend who I was put in touch with earlier in the year, she gave me the name of an organization where, if you qualify, you can get your IVF meds for FREE! You have to earn so much in a year, have zero infertility insurance coverage, and prove how much you have spent out of pocket for past infertility treatments, and then their company reviews your application, and if approved, you have the major portion of your needed IVF medication given to you! That is a $2,000-3,000 value for FREE! So, I applied.... and we were APPROVED!!! That was just incredible! Talk about a huge weight off our shoulders, and just another perfect alignment that IVF was meant to be in our future.
So the time came in late August for me to start my medications to have a September IVF cycle. Well, God stepped in again!
I had already started the first mediation, I was about 2 weeks in to it when a pain on my lower right side started getting worse and worse. I ignored it for about a week or so, but then one morning, I woke up, and the first words out of my mouth to my husband were "I need to go to the ER". I've never been to the ER before, but it was a Sunday morning, and it was Labor Day weekend, so I knew my general physician would be closed on the holiday Monday, and the thought of waiting until Tuesday to go in sounded way too long to wait, so off we went at 7am to the ER. Within 4 hours of arriving, I was having emergency surgery to remove my burst appendix! Talk about a HUGE surprise! I've never had surgery in my life before last year, and then I have two surgeries within 6 months of each other! God was just getting my body all prepared to have a safe pregnancy.
Since my appendix had burst, I had to stay in the hospital for 5 days to make sure no infection had spread. So because of this huge turn of events, we had to call off our September IVF.
Because the IVF process is a 2 month process, this meant that the next time we could attempt IVF would be in November. This sounded so far away from early September! The very good thing about that timing though is that I was able to have a very, very busy fall shooting season, without the concern of being in the early stages of pregnancy while trying to run around and photograph toddlers! The clear theme to our whole year long process of IVF is that it had to be on God's timing, and that is not a bad thing! He knows when it is perfect, aligning everything that needs to take place for a successful outcome.
So Sept. was spent working and working some more! October was working, and then towards the end of the month, starting my IVF medicine. Then early November started the doctor visits to watch how my body is responding to the medicine. That is a whole other hurdle to clear. Just because you are pumping your body full of medicine does not mean that your body is going to respond! As I wrote about last year in our 2009 journey with IUI treatments, there were 2 or 3 months where my body did not respond at all and we had to call off the treatments those months.
Well, this time, my body responded great and did its job abundantly! The day came in mid-November for my retrieval and we were just so excited! My husband had taken the next few days off of work to take care of me because I had heard that the recovery from the retrieval was the most painful part of this process, but amazingly enough, I really felt pretty good! I was a little bit sore the day of, but after that, I felt pretty much back to myself!
Then came the 5 day wait while our embryos were growing and being watched carefully at my doctor's lab. We started out with 10 fertilized embryos. Then after 3 days we were down to 5 that still looked good. Then on the transfer day, we still had 5, and they transfered the two strongest and best grade embryos. (They have a grading system so they can put in the 2 that look like they have the best chance to become a healthy fetus.) So when we left the doctor, we technically still had 3 embryos left that they were watching to see if they stay strong enough to be frozen in a couple days. I whole-heartedly expected all three to make it, since they had made it this far, but then after a few days, we got the call that none had made it to freeze. That was very sad and confusing! How could they look strong one day, and not the next? But that is just how they developed, and so we had to be thankful for the fact that we did have two beautiful, perfect embryos transferred in to me.
*How many can say they have a picture of themself in the "blastocyst" stage of life?!! :) *The baby is the dark circle part inside the bigger, clear circle.
I had to be on bedrest for days to make sure the embryos had their best chance to implant. This is all happening during the week of Thanksgiving. Thankfully, the transfer happened on Tuesday, so by Thursday of that week (Thanksgiving), I was allowed to get up and go see our family to celebrate the holiday with them. This was also still a very busy time for me at work. I made my schedule out in advance that I would not have any shoots during this time, but of course there is still editing to do on my computer everyday. In some ways, that was a good thing because it kept me busy during the wait to see if I was pregnant. We had a 12 day wait. Seemed like FOREVER!
The day finally came where I went in to the doc in the morning for my blood test, and the nurse is to call you later in the day with the results. I told the nurse to leave the results on my voicemail so I could check the voicemail on speaker with my husband. I expected the call to come late in the day. I had heard it comes around 4pm or so. But my phone rang at noon! At the time, I was in Dallas dropping off an order and I saw on my caller ID that it was the doctor, and then that I had a voicemail, and MAN was that nerve wrecking! Seeing that I have a voicemail, and my phone knows the results of my pregnancy test, but I had to wait to find out. Not only that, but I was so afraid of it being negative that a huge part of me DIDN'T want to know! It was so scary! All of our prayers, hard work, and patience from the past year had lead up to that one voicemail waiting for me.
I called my husband and we had the hardest time deciding where to listen to the message! At first I said that I'll just come up to his work and we can meet in the parking lot (we didn't want to wait until he got off work at 5 to listen to it!) Then he said no, I'll come to your work and we'll listen to it there. Then we finally realized that we live just about one minute from each of our offices, so why don't we just meet at home?!!
So that is what we did! We stood in our living room, held on to each other, my heart was pounding, I put my phone on speaker, and turned on my voicemail. It was the nurse. She said some things in the beginning, then she said "I have fabulous news!" And then she continued to talk, but my head stopped listening at "FABULOUS"!!!! It was so so so SURREAL! My head could not wrap around the fact that I, Julie, indeed DID have a baby growing in my tummy. I have never been able to say that before! Shortly after we got the news, I had to take a pregnancy test so I could get my first positive test reading!
Just wonderful!!!!
My beta numbers were so high that it looked like we had a chance for twins! But we had a 3 week wait until our first sono to see how many babies there were.
Those 3 weeks were spent telling friends and family our wonderful news, enjoying our first Christmas as a family with a baby on the way, and seeing the world through rose colored glasses as nothing could dampen the joy of knowing I was pregnant!
My sweet assistant, Kari, made this adorable onesie for us!
Then the day came for our first sono. Talk about excitement! The thought that we were actually going to see our baby(ies)!! The doctor pulled up the ultrasound screen and said, well, it looks like you have one baby! We were so thankful that either one of the babies made it and implanted, but the sad part was that the 2nd embryo that didn't make it, we saw it on the ultrasound. It was just a much smaller circle than our baby and the doctor said it looks like it tried to implant, but just didn't make it. And as sad as that made me that our 2nd one didn't make it, it all the more made me realize what a precious gift that our one baby did make it, since those tiny lives are so, so fragile!
We got to hear our baby's heartbeat at that time, at just 7 weeks along!
We were in love from the start!
So, that is our (very detailed and LONG) story of our how precious baby came to be! We are so thankful for our gift, and so so happy to meet this sweet babe in just 6 months.
Thank you all for your prayers for us during our infertility journey, and now for a safe and healthy baby and pregnancy. We are so grateful, and feel so blessed to be able to share our wonderful news!
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