Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe

So now that we've all gotten the EXTREMELY hard decision of what to do about the end of Google Reader (which I never used) behind us, lets talk about making tough decisions… because sometimes eeny, meeny, miny, moe isn't the best decision making strategy (who knew?).

The husband and I have chatted about our next steps... probably a bit more than he really wanted to. But he was a trooper and we thought through as many possible "what if's" as we could come up with. So where do we go from here? Which of the options are we going with? Before we get to that, you'll need a little background information to understand our choices.

Way back when, some eons ago, when I was super amped up on Clomid, I attempted to make my husband think through all possible outcomes (i.e. what if Clomid doesn't work? whatever will we do?). I found this quiz that was designed to help couples ascertain what it is about a child that they believe will make them happy. The goal of the quiz is to help couples recognize that they may be looking for different things out of a child and/or fertility treatments. And yes, I did make him take the quiz. And yes, I did lie and say it was "just a few questions" rather than SEVENTY statements requiring a rating of zero to five. The quiz was moderately helpful, but more so was the conversation it facilitated. Sam and I are one of those couples who are looking for different things from fertility treatments.

For Sam, statements like number ten "I want a baby so my genes will be immortal" scored around a four or five. This indicates that a genetic connection to his child/children is very important to him. After discussing it further, we discovered that this statement is really true in regards to one child. He is completely fine with adoption, but it is important to him that he pass on his genetic traits to at least one child.

For me, genetics isn't so important. You may remember from this post, that I actually did not want to pass on my DNA when I was younger. For whatever reason, the idea of not seeing my green eyes, or high cheek bones reflected in my child's face is not, and never has been, a big deal to me. But for me, the desire, the reason I've gone through fertility treatments is because I want to carry a child. Pregnancy is a life experience that I've desired since I was very, very young. I want to feel a baby grow inside of me, I want to feel the kicks and punches, I want to hear the thrum, thump of the heartbeat, I want to experience birth, I want to feel a baby skin to skin just moments after birth, and I want to nurse my child.

So as you can see, we kind of come at this from two different places. We are both open to adoption. Adoption is part of our family building plan. But we both have a reason, though different, for wanting "our child". Now granted, we could both be made "happy" and fulfill our dreams by utilizing Sam's sperm, donor eggs, and my uterus... but I honestly don't know that we will ever get to that point. If we discover that I am in fact a "genetic dead end"or that my eggs are of such poor quality that our chances become pathetic even through IVF, well, then we would have to have a serious heart to heart. My ultimate desire is for a family, in whatever way, shape, or form it comes to me. I'm not sure that the pregnancy and birth experience is reason enough for us to spend $30-40,000 on IVF with donor eggs. Particularly if we didn't learn that donor eggs were needed until after we already spent $18,000 on IVF with my own eggs. It would simply take us sooooo long to come up with that kind of money, sacrificing the pregnancy and birth experience wouldn't seem that awful in light of knowing I could have a family more quickly via other means.

So where does this leave us? How do we make our dreams come true give our dreams a chance? For now, the plan hasn't changed all that much. We are still planning to pursue IVF. I say planning because we do have some hard questions that we want answers to before we move forward. But IVF makes the most sense for us as a next step. And here's why: adoption might bring us a baby faster, but we would still be turning to IVF later, when my body is older, when my eggs are older, when our chances are slowly but surely getting worse. As we don't currently know status of my eggs, it seems like a significant risk to place IVF on the back burner. Adoption is available for years to come... IVF may not be. So the plan is ONE IVF: meaning one fresh cycle, if we fail, we will systematically move through any embryos that we might have left over. If we make it all the way through IVF and any FET's that the fresh cycle yielded, we will move on to adoption. Once we have created our family, we may revisit IVF if that desire still exists. And if at any point we decide to begin the adoption process, we will move ahead with that, even if that is before we've completed the IVF part. What we will not do is leave embryos on ice... we will utilize all of our embryos until we fail at each and every one, or we successfully bring home a baby, even if that means that adoption and IVF bump into each other and we have multiple babies enter our family all at once.

So there you have it: the plan. I'm sure to those of you who are not going through infertility, it seems crazy lengthy with lots and lots of extras... but if anything this journey has taught us to dream big, but to plan for the unexpected. We try to think though each and every possible outcome so we don't find ourselves shocked or overwhelmed by this crazy ride. Our next steps include deciding once and for all where we are going to cycle (more info on this soon), and selecting a payment method. So kudos to us... we have eliminated options 1 and 5 from the lengthy list. But we still have LOTS of decisions to make and LOTS of information to gather. So look out for more news on our decision making process!