Now Vs. Later

They say the Devil is in the details. I say the Devil is in the Jell-O. I’m sorry, but nothing good moves in such an unnatural way. In any case, since it’s the details that seem to matter, I thought I would share some with you; particularly those that pertain to timing.

In a nutshell, most Intended Parents (IPs) research their butts off, choose an agency or clinic and then sign contracts, which sets off a huge snowball effect: An Egg donor and a surrogate are selected, the ED is given medication to help her ovaries turn into ovulating machines, then around 6 weeks later the IPs fly out to wherever the IVF will take place, in our case Thailand, and the eggs are harvested, the sperm is…produced, the eggs are fertilized, and after a couple days of maturing, the embryos are then implanted into the uterus of the surrogate. (It turns out that embryos are a lot like the cheese used in Cheez-Its…they’re given time to mature.)

But, our journey is a little different. You see, I’m currently in nursing school and set to finish my program in around, ohhhh, nine months or so. As appealing as it would be to sit through finals knowing my baby had been born across the globe, we decided it would be best not to chance it and wanted to make sure I was done before the big day. Plus, having a baby while still in my program was a little too “16 and Pregnant” for me: “I don’t know how Im’ma get through this schoolin now that I gots me a baby…”  Granted, I’m not going to be pregnant. Nor am I 16. And, I have all of my teeth and don’t refer to my husband as my “baby daddy”. So, I suppose I wouldn’t be exactly like the girls on that show, but we’ll just go with it. (I will say, there have been some intelligent, ambitious young women on that show who simply made a mistake…but most of them, not so much.) But, the problem is that if we didn’t go to Thailand now (in August), we would have had to wait until next year for me to have enough time off from school to make the trip to Asia. After seeing what happened with visa regulations in India, we really didn’t want to wait any longer than we had to lest Thailand change its regulations as well; so in our minds waiting until next year really wasn’t an option.

Knowing all of this, my brain went into over drive. I was determined to make this work. I came up with several “solutions”, and sent them off to my wonderful coordinator, who was kind enough to confirm my suspicions: my ideas were both crazy and just not humanly possible. However, being the surrogacy goddess that she is, she presented us with a much more simple solution…why not just freeze your swimmers, wait a few weeks, then thaw them out? I think we can all agree that this idea isn’t as interesting as my idea of just asking the surrogate to “hold it” for an extra month, or somehow manipulating time in our favor; but it was perhaps a bit more practical. (Believe it or not, I had actually come up with one practical idea, which was to freeze embryos and perform a frozen embryo transfer later. But I learned that as far as quality goes, it’s much better to freeze the sperm than it is to freeze embryos. This makes sense given that our clinic uses Intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to inject a single sperm into the egg. So, even if some of the sample is somehow degraded because of being frozen, we only need about a dozen healthy sperm out of the  180 million or so that will be in the sample. I think that’s doable.)

So, unlike most IPs who start their two week wait right after making their donation, we get to start our two month wait. This time around, we’ll be meeting the egg donor, leaving our samples, and enjoying our time in Thailand. The swimmers will be iced until October, when they will be thawed just before the ovum will be harvested, fertilized and implanted. Is it an ideal situation? Perhaps not; but for us, it’s certainly the best situation possible under the circumstances.  

So, for now we’ll deal with this. We’ll worry about the rest of the details later.

(By the way...whatever happened to Now&Laters? They're like the rough and tumble cousin of Starburst, but I can never seem to find them any more. These first world problems are brutal I tell ya...)