Author: leej

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Babies

Back to zero

Jordan scheduled an ultrasound for yesterday. Fortuitously.

She began miscarrying last night.

Fortuitous because she had some warning.

She had all day to grieve because the ultrasound revealed the fetus hadn’t grown since the ultrasound we had at the U.

Obviously there were many tears and cries of anguish—and there will continue to be on occasion. But she said a few things to me yesterday that were comforting—a sign of understanding and maturity.

In so many words, she said “things only get better.” A strong stance for someone who has been through so much in the last years.

But a stance from someone who is willing to hold on and continue to place God first.

Do we definitively know the eternal status of the fetus? No. Is there hope no matter what? Yes.

Are there still wails and tears? Yes.

I was impressed at Ester Rasband’s funeral by this scripture:

45 Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die, and more especially for those that have not hope of a glorious resurrection.

Doctrine and Covenants 42:45

I don’t generally weep from those who depart mortality. My tears come for the missing and the temporary loss—when they come at all.

My tears this time were for both the loss and for Jordan. Which provides a reflection for me: love was at the center of these tears (more especially hers).

So this leaves us very much back at the beginning. Together, but not expecting another.

Is it possible we will try again, have another embryo implanted? Possible. But it’s time to regroup and mourn.

We can’t take two years like last time.

Hopefully we can find peace and healing through atonement sooner this time.

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Babies

So let’s try this again…

The last blood test was “inconclusive.”

“Yeah, we still can’t tell whether you’re pregnant.”

??

“Come on for a third one. That will really show a trend.”

Sure. Whatever.

It’s interesting to see this approach. Emotionally, not great. But accuracy-wise, a good move, I think.

The number did go up last time. Just not enough.

So that’s good, I guess? The number would have to go up again, by double.

And we’ll probably have to have some sort of investigation of the space, because apparently ectopic is a potential outcome.

If it number goes down, I think years will be inevitable.

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Babies

Are we or aren’t we?

We’ve done a lot since the last post. The short of it is, we’re now working with university of Utah fertility and have had a much better experience.

We initiated a frozen embryo transfer (FET) and that was implanted two weeks ago.

According to what we understood, we were to go back yesterday for a blood test to determine pregnancy.

For whatever they measure, a definitely non-pregnant result is <5 units. A definitely pregnant result is >100 units.

Jordan tested 44 units.

The nurse called to discuss results with us. The discussion went something like:

“Your number is 44. We’d like to see 100+ by now.”

“So am I pregnant?”

“We’re not really sure and not willing to say. It’s usually clearer than this. We’ve scheduled a second blood draw for two days later, and we’ll be able to determine based on whether the measurement trends up or down.”

So that’s entirely inconclusive.

Probably better for Jordan’s head, honestly. She was pretty tightly wired yesterday before the test.

And after

That doesn’t mean tomorrow won’t be similar. But it was nice to have the draw at 8 and have results by 0930.

So we’ll see how it goes.

I actually appreciate the use of trends to determine diagnosis. Most of my experience with medicine is “you have this right now. It’s a problem because that’s different from ‘average’.”

As opposed to having trend data taken over time and available in the long term.

So we’ll see how it goes. But Jordan’s feeling a lot like Schrödinger’s box right now.

You know the one that may or may not have a live cat in it.

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Blame

I probably need to figure out how to not blame myself for things outside of my control. Because as you can probably imagine I blame myself for the failed implantation. Maybe I didn’t relax enough during my “princess days” or I relaxed too much. Maybe I did a medication incorrectly. Maybe I’ll make a terrible mother and so God doesn’t want me to have children. The list goes on. It’s interesting that I feel the need to take responsibility for the failure because I am normally too prideful to do so. I also am really bad at attempting things I’ve already failed at once. It will take some mental recovery to try again.

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Ingratitude

After all the poking and prodding, the egg retrieval, more poking and prodding, embryo transfer, more poking, and and excruciating 10 day wait….we’re not pregnant.

Devastated doesn’t even begin to cover what I felt.

There were and still are tears.

The triggers seem to lurk around every corner.

As I was laying in bed listening to a meditation specifically for sleep As I laid in bed running through different scenarios and memories relating to IVF while a sleep meditation was playing I happened to catch a few words of what was said. Gratitude, happiness, generosity and how they were all related.

Since receiving the news Wednesday I have been filled with ingratitude. None of the wonderful things I have in my life husband, family, garden, etc have been enough. I can only focus on the thing I don’t have-children. Thus, making myself miserable any moment of free time.

The way to change this would be to be more grateful right? It will take practice because practice makes permanent.

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Babies

Nope

So 10 days after implantation, they do a blood test to confirm a lady is pregnant. From implantation, there is supposed to be a 60+% chance of taking home a live baby.

Jordan’s not pregnant.

We implanted two embryos.

Still working through how to feel. Not all the feelings are positive.

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Babies

The beginning?

A year ago, we started pursuing this “maybe we should have a baby thing” as intensely as we ever have. (I want to be really clear, I don’t know that we slaved and prayed and cried the way some people do/claim to do.)

Anyway, we took it seriously. Because it wasn’t happening naturally, we started making appointments with doctors to see what could be done.

Last July, we met with a doctor who practices NaPro (natural procreation) methods, with the intent to try to address the root causes of why we weren’t having children. NaPro claims to be as effective as the most aggressive methods (IVF) for reproduction, without having all the excessive amounts of drugs added to your body.

Long story short, it actually doesn’t work at all if the guy is the main cause of the problem. (And these couples aren’t included in the success statistics. So NaPro is actually quite a bit less effective than it claims to be.)

So we move to a men’s fertility specialist who told us all the things we already knew from the test results and offered a potential solution: have surgery that might (~30% likelihood) solve the problem.

Because this is a journey a couple goes on, I figured it was worth going under the knife to see if we could save Jordan a bunch of drugs, injections, and hassle. So in October 2019, I got two new scars just above my pubic bone, where they removed 1.5x the normal number of varicoceles. (Yes, I had trouble running and jumping fro a while.)

Post surgery, they wanted us to wait 3 months to see if my counts improved. They didn’t so we were on to more and different fun.

To this point, we’d worked exclusively with the University of Utah medical system. It’s the first system I’ve dealt with that seems to have its act together, and I really didn’t want to go to a new set of doctors.

But Utah Fertility Center is literally 5 mins away, and Jordan didn’t want to go to SLC for all her appointments (possibly a good thing, but for different reasons). She got what she wanted. That story is elsewhere.

(It was a good thing we went through UFC, even if the customer service has been poor: UofU shut down all non-essential things, including fertility, and UFC didn’t.)

We implant today. We have some (unknown at the moment, but we’ll know in less than 90 mins) number of viable potential humans in test tubes (or petri dishes) that will get a chance to grow up into little gods.

So it’s been a year. The next step of the journey will be almost another year, but by March next year (assuming the worst statistics still ignore us) we’ll have a little human running around.

Well, lounging. It won’t start running around till October 2021 at the soonest.

It’s quite the progress for a year. And we need to start looking into what the next leg of the journey looks like, and how to balance new requirements with good things we already do.

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Babies

Waiting

Jordan went in for egg extraction this morning. (Why they don’t just call it eggstraction is totally beyond me. Marketing opportunity utterly wasted.)

I get to sit in the car and wait.

It’s one thing to consider being a father and having a child come in a normal way. That seems pretty natural. But rushing through manual stimulation to put a sperm donation in a little cup before speeding to the eggstraction (I won’t miss the opportunity) so Jordan can be anesthetized and have eggs surgically removed, then have eggs and sperm mixed up outside the body, live in testtubes for 5 days and have a smaller number put back in seems really unnatural.

Like we’re doing an end-around on evolution.

There’s probably good reasons, biologically, we haven’t yet had children. My parents struggled to get me and my brother. Although we’re pretty awesome in a lot of ways, we’re severely lacking in others.

So maybe although I have a lot of traits that would be good to pass on, the ones that aren’t shouldn’t be? And so for whatever reason my reproductive system is much less effective than others’.

However, the blessing of posterity is the greatest that can be granted to mankind. And anything should be sacrificed to obtain that blessing. Discomfort. Money.

Abraham basically gave everything. Having a child at 100 and 90 (let’s give Sarai her due) seems absolutely bonkers. Then being asked to sacrifice him 14-40 years later when he’s the only inheritor also seems nuts.

Maybe the modern version of that is paying money (a real sacrifice for many people) to have children.

But what will they be like?

Mental health problems are pretty dominant on my mom’s side. Maternal grandfather, both my mom’s siblings. My mom certainly has issues she won’t admit to. Kurt and I both have depressive tendencies, even if we’re not likely to admit it out loud.

Most of Jordan’s siblings have some sort of mental health obstacle. Some cope better with them than others. Jordan copes well some days and not others.

Are we expanding the mental capacity of humanity, while doubling the mental health susceptibility of our children?

Or is that something we can teach and parent around?

Jordan worries about some kids getting my physical genes and some of them getting hers.

That’s probably a good worry.

How will we encourage all of them to grow up to work hard, sleep long, and eat well?

And is it ok that some are beanpoles and some are tanks?

Yes. But how do I teach them that?

What is the world going to be like?

Lots of people buy homes based on the school district they are in. I’m pretty sure in 15 years, school as we know it won’t exist. Or there will be enough options that we won’t have to indulge poorly executed prison systems (that happen to have sports).

If nothing else, the COVID pandemic has taught us that we can act differently than we have and the world will still continue.

Maybe they’ll call me soon and my brain can stop waiting.

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Sometimes you have no idea

We started walking down a path this week. A path we were interested in investigating and a path we were 100% sure we were going to be on.

We kept walking down it. Doing each next logical step and testing how it felt.

We (still) looked back, wondering how specific things would work out down other paths and how loose ends that would end up breaking would be tied if we went down this path.

I still don’t have answers. I’m not even sure this path is Right.

But sometimes you don’t know. Sometimes you have no idea. Sometimes a few steps in the dark still isn’t enough to illuminate the way.

Sometimes even doing a big scary thing on the path isn’t enough to confirm it’s right.

Sometimes you still look back. Almost always you want solid confirmation it’s Right.

That doesn’t always come.

Sometimes it’s the little things that support the path.

Sometimes it’s finding the right guide. Sometimes it’s a complete (seeming, but not actual) coincidence that causes you to take a step you wouldn’t have otherwise.

I honestly don’t know whether this path is the path I should be one. But when I saw similar divergences in the past and started down them, the path turned out far better than I ever expected.

God is in the details. The way an hour makes a difference in choices. The right finger movement, even when it’s not the normal one. The people you meet. The place you live.

It’s not perfect, always. But growth doesn’t come in sure moments, and growth doesn’t come when you only lift what you already know you can.

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Babies

Being a dad

In my late teens/early twenties, I figured I get married some time between 21-24, and have children relatively quick thereafter.

Neither of those happened.

Married at 28, no kids at 32.

Jordan wrote about some of her feelings in Hard Heart, and although mine are quite different, I feel some things similarly.

I’m over-competent. I do most things better than most people. And I do some things at such a high level I don’t even know how to coach incompetent people how to do it better because some of what I do is intuitive.

Most non-parents probably feel they would be better parents than others they see.

I feel this pretty frequently. However, I am also aware I have zero experience, so “I would do ____ differently” doesn’t really cut it.

So I’ve wanted to be a dad for a long time.

Having it not happen hasn’t been that hard. Dating for a long time without getting married taught me that it’s ok for things to take a long time, and I shouldn’t be overly worried about things not happening in my timeline.

But that doesn’t mean when I see a newborn I am not overcome with “that’s cute. I want one.”

Or when I see a toddler, “I’d like to have one of those around, and try to see the world through their eyes” (even if I have no idea how to understand anything they attempt to say).

There are similar lines that I have for children, youth, and teens, too.

A teen in my house is likely to be a formidable thing. Two smart parents, one that relies heavily on logic and reasoning to get things done. Combine that with the un-reason of teenage hormones, and Jordan and I might meet our match.

But one day we might be able to have a deep conversation with a creature we made that has learned to think and wipe it’s own butt (this is why a dog will always be inferior to actual children).

So am I ready for the challenge of fatherhood? No, not at all. But am I willing to deal with it? Yes.

The late nights. The lack of sleep. The crazy world we apparently live in. Sure. Let’s go.