the background

I've been putting off starting this blog for awhile now because I wasn't sure what I should say in my first post. Some of you might appreciate a little background, so here goes, bullet point style:

• You could say this all started one rainy night as we were driving across the 520 bridge into Seattle, and blake said, "I think I'm ready to have kids now."
• You could say it started a few months later in March 2008 when I had my first lung surgery. My favorite nurse said to me, "so, if you don't mind my asking; now that you know you have a genetic disease, are you going to have kids, knowing they might get it?"
• Or October 2008 w/ my second lung surgery, which suggested that BHD was affecting my life a little more than I had anticipated.
• Or, sometime fall 2008 when Blake's cousin called to say she was pregnant (hurrah!) and did we know the amazing things science could do these days, including ensuring that your baby didn't have certain genetic diseases?
• Or Dec 2008 when we had our first appt at the IVF clinic to learn about this new science that could allow us to have BHD-free kids.
• From that day forward we started planning. Any last trips we wanted to take before kids? (kayaking, hawaii) things we wanted to do? (a triathlon or two in the summer) things we could cut out of our spending so that we could pay for all these appts? (lots of stuff)
• In March we told our parents our plans. We needed Dana's parents' blood so that a special Dana specific BHD "probe" could be made, and the process of building and testing the probe would take a few months.
• In August Dana did the danskin triathlon, and the next day, started treatment. Pills, injections, more injections, lots of blood draws and ultrasounds to measure and count diff things to make sure everything was as expected.
• In September we harvested 47 eggs (that's a lot). 46 were mature, and 42 fertilized. on and on, as each day passed a few more dropped off the viable chain and in the end we implanted one back in Dana and froze 9 that looked healthy enough to possibly sustain the freeze / later unfreeze process.
• Insert a fun story here about hyperstimulating. okay, actually it wasn't fun and included gaining 2-3 lbs of water a day for a few days in a row and having to get drained.
• Pregnancy test two weeks later - weak positive. although we knew we were looking at 50/50 odds by only implanting one, it was still sad to hear it was such a weak number. 3 days later we retested and by then I was officially not pregnant. they think the embryo prob started to implant, but something didn't go quite right 'cuz it didn't stick.
• So... then there we were. Had to wait 2 months for my body to recoup which gave us a little time to think about what was next. Frozen embryos in general have 70% the success rate of "fresh" embryos. So if we wanted to implant one and try again, we'd be looking at 35% odds. Plus, in my specific case, using a frozen biopsied (because of the BHD probe process) embryo, our clinic, and most others, have experienced a 0% success rate. a few clinics on the east coast had pulled it off, but... not looking too likely. But here we were w/ 9 little frozen guys, hard not to use them at all...
• So, in November we started treatment again and this time we decided we'd transfer two. At the high end of stats (not taking the biopsied part into account), that gave us a 46% chance of one baby, 42% chance of no success, and 12% chance of twins. At the low end of course we were looking at nothing working at all, or 100% chance of no babies.
• In Dec we transferred, and two weeks later, while at lunch w/ some girl friends I got the call - I was pregnant!
• My hcg levels from my blood draw were high enough that they said there was a chance of twins. oh my, not what we had bargained for.
• On Christmas Eve / Christmas Day while talking w/ family we told them all the news. It was funny thinking that 4 years ago on Christmas Day was when Blake proposed, and here we were again, sharing major news.
• On new year's eve, we went in for our six week ultrasound. (IVF, my having lung issues, and the possibility of twins makes me high-risk, so I'll have more frequent checks than your average bear). That ultrasound confirmed twins.

So... where are we now? We're at 7 weeks today. Another ultrasound is scheduled for 8 weeks. The twins thing is crazy, crazy news. Part of me is getting all worked up about it and how my life is about to change even more than I was planning, and the other part knows that 6/7 weeks is still really early. There are all sorts of scenarios where you begin w/ twins but only end up w/ a singleton. Until we make it another 5 weeks or so, there's still a decent chance we could lose one. but we did hear both babies' heartbeats at 6 weeks, which is apparently a really good sign. So I'm just itching to get to 8 weeks and the next ultrasound so I can make sure they're still in there and happy!

Now, I have made this a public blog, but I havne't told my coworkers yet, or many of my friends, so for those of you who are reading this, I'd love to hear from you via comments, email, phone, etc, but please don't do any facebook posting about this quite yet.

well that's about it. blake has been incredible through this whole thing, including the fact that I can now smell my dinner cooking downstairs. So... I think I'll go eat it!