The Outcome

“It was good” is my short answer for “what was the outcome?” if the two babies I’m pushing in the stroller don’t make it abundantly obvious. It started out auspiciously- on August 8, the first day of the IVF cycle, my antral follicle count, the baseline number of eggs one has ready to mature in a given month was 16, which is perfect. So they started me out on a low dose of stimulation drugs. Things went a little less well from there. The birth control pills and lupron had shut down my body so well that I was over-suppressed, so the doctor keep ratcheting my dose of the Gonal-F until I was taking the maximum acceptable dose. Every morning when I went in for my ultrasound and blood work, there was the constant speculation about whether or not they would cancel the whole cycle. Thankfully, the night of my 14th day of stims, I got the go-ahead that they would do the egg retrieval on Monday. They retrieved 10 eggs, 8 were mature, the embryologist fertilized 3 and all 3 survived to transfer. And that began our anxious 12 days. I’ll skip over that part, because it was, well, anxiety-provoking and not a little depressing.
But on September 6, after the longest day of work EVER-- my poor clients- God help whoever was hoping that I could focus enough to help them save their marriage THAT day- we finally got the call that we waiting for. We were sitting on our couch, watching the movie Love Actually that my wonderful cul-de-sac friends from college had sent as part of my in vitro support kit, when the phone rang. It was Lynn, the nurse that had been our nurse and contact person daily the whole cycle. She asked if Rob was there, so my heart sank- I thought she might want him there because she was going to give me bad news. So he picked up the other phone and she told us “Congratulations!! You’re pregnant!” I asked her if she was kidding and she said that she typically didn’t joke with the IVF patients. That’s when I burst into the hysterical crying and said something about it having been so long. I asked about the hCG number and she told me it was 269.3, and they liked to see it about 50, which was our first inkling that there might be more than one baby. Then we sat, stunned for a few minutes and started making a few calls. My sister, Erin, was the first person we told. We had community group that night, so we left early for it, so we could walk the nature trail near our house and process everything. The men and women were meeting separately that night, so we both got to tell the groups of people who had praying for us and had organized the 48 hour of prayer after our embryo transfer. It was an incredible night.
Later that week, my hCG had more than doubled, which was our second inkling there might be more than one baby on the way. Two weeks later, we had our first ultrasound and saw both of their beautiful, blinky little heartbeats. It only took about another twenty weeks for us to believe that they were really coming.
Two weeks ago, on the 6th, we loaded up our two live, take home babies- E. rode in the Bjorn with Rob and I wore L. in my wrap sling and we hiked the nature trail again. This time last year we had no idea how wonderful this would be and I don’t think after everything, either of us had the ability to hope or imagine that we would finally, really, get to be parents.
And as it turned out, the whole world figured out what was going on with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who as near as I can calculate, got pregnant two weeks after we did. Somehow, I feel like it was a lot less of a hassle for them.