Day: Conception Minus 4 (Maybe)

I never would have guessed that this is where I'd be. . .I turned 26 less than a month ago, and in 4 days, I will begin trying to get pregnant for my friends Kira and Scott. In 4 days, we will begin doing ICI, best known as the turkey baster method, except we are going to get a little bit more intense with it. Essentially, we will use Instead softcups to lock the "baby batter" (as my best friend Jeremy calls it) in place for a few hours, thus attempting to increase our chance of conception (since ICI can be low - anywhere from 5-30% success rates -- per cycle -- have been reported). We will try on Friday, Saturday and again Monday night (the day I am most likely to ovulate).

But let me back up a little bit and explain how it is that I got here.

On October 14th, 2010, I found out that I was pregnant. I had felt a little bit 'off' for a few days -- feeling nauseous all the time, which was exacerbated when I worked out, and feeling constantly exhausted. Far too exhausted to be social. I spent more afternoons laying on my couch watching TV in the first two weeks of that month than I probably had throughout the rest of the year. My body felt like I was depressed, but my mood didn't match. I'm not sure what, exactly, provoked me to buy a pregnancy test. I may have been a few days late, although at this point I don't quite remember, but I do remember buying the test, and seeing the faint pink plus sign appear. The horizontal line was thick, certain, and that line alone would mean the test was negative. But towards the third minute, a very faint vertical line started to show. If I had not had all the physical symptoms, I would have just thought that I "overcooked" the test, waited too long, and the results weren't accurate. I didn't know at this point that any vertical line, no matter how faint, shows that there is SOME HCG level present, which means that you are pregnant, even if it is just very early in the pregnancy.

I called the father first with the news, crying so hysterically I'm surprised he could understand me at all. I realized that I was so nervous about becoming a mother that I told the father I had to get off the phone so I could call my mom. In my head, I felt like I was in the same position as those mothers on 16 & Pregnant, even though I was a 25 year old lawyer who owned her own house, was starting her career, had savings. Even though I was an adult on paper, I never felt less like one in my life. My mom, however, reassured me that I would be okay, that I would have my family's support, that having a baby would not get in the way of my dreams. She told me that she and her own mother had loved being pregnant and becoming mothers more than any other experience in their lives.

Long story short, over the next few weeks, I picked names (Henry for a boy, Ava Lillian or Aspen Lillian for a girl), painted my office a soothing blue perfect for a nursery, and read What To Expect When You're Expecting and the Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy. I had several ultrasounds and HCG tests, and I modified my workouts (from regular CrossFit to CrossFit Mom). I even ordered a CrossFit Mom hoodie a size larger than normal to wear while working out with my baby bump. The hoodie displayed the gym's logo of a pregnant woman holding an olympic barbell overhead. It was exactly what I wanted to look like when I was further along. Even though the baby was unplanned, and the situation was not what I had seen in my future, I was elated about the baby, and even though it was still early in the pregnancy, I raved to everyone about my excitement and my plans.

On November 12, 2010, at 7 weeks pregnant, after much testing and uncertainty on the part of my midwife and nurses, I lost the baby. I had a painful D&C on a Friday morning, and largely spent the following weekend curled into fetal position, sobbing. The next month, I felt the emotional part of depression that I had seemed to be missing in October. I was glad to have a job just to have something to think about that wasn't my loss and my misery. (The back of the book, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, has a line that always comes to mind when I think of this period -- something to the effect of, "Doesn't anyone understand that self-pity is a full-time job?")

Towards the end of November, I decided that I would have a baby on my own using a sperm donor. I sorted through profiles on donor websites, finally settling for the "perfect" donor -- a music therapy major in college with a 3.8 GPA, bilingual, guitar- and piano-playing personal trainer, 6 feet tall with curly brown hair and brown eyes (he was said to look like Mark Ruffalo). When I showed my father the donor's profile, my father asked, "Can't you just meet him and do this the old-fashioned way?"

But the longer I considered sperm donation, and raising a child alone, the more I realized the situation wasn't quite right. At least, not right now. I went to therapy to deal with having lost my baby, and came to realize that using a sperm donor would be my way of taking control of a situation over which I had no control at all. I knew I needed to find a healthy way to move forward from my loss, but I just wasn't sure how.

And this loss felt spectacularly isolated. Any time someone I knew had died, there was at least one other person with whom I shared the loss. But this time, the loss was exclusively mine. Even the baby's father did not share the loss with me -- he was completely out of the picture at this point. I did not know how to recover from a suffering that felt uniquely my own.

Until, that is, I met Kira in December. Kira had been close friends with my roommate for years, and one day we went to lunch at Panera, and over salads she told me about how hard she and her husband Scott had been trying to conceive. For some unknown reason, Kira doesn't ovulate, so she had been put on Clomid to induce ovulation each month. Over the past year, though, Kira and Scott only succeeded in getting pregnant once, although Kira miscarried shortly after she found out she was pregnant. Kira was the first person who I knew understood how I felt. She knew the sorrow of inadequate HCG levels. She knew how each period after losing a baby felt like a whole new loss of its own.

So after Kira went through two more cycles with no conception, and did some more diagnostic tests with no results, I offered to surrogate for her and Scott. I think we both felt -- or at least I did -- that we had met each other at this time in our lives for a reason.

Everyone I've told so far has been shocked at first to find out my plans, and most people ask whether I'm worried that this will be hard for me, especially after my recent loss. I know that I would wonder the same thing if I were on the outside in this situation, but somehow this feels like the most perfect possible conclusion of a traumatic experience. Before ever getting pregnant, I would never have considered surrogacy. In law school (I'm a family lawyer, ironically enough) there were signs asking for egg donors in the girls' bathrooms, and I knew I could never donate eggs. I wouldn't feel comfortable with my biological child being raised by other people, being taken care of who knows how, not knowing where or who my child is. . .But now, knowing Kira and Scott, I feel completely comfortable with the idea. They are the most loving, caring, giving couple I know, and I know they will give my child -- our child -- an amazing life. . .

So here's hoping that the insemination takes this cycle. L'chaim.