Days 12, 13, & 14: Setback

Things are going fantastically well. Leah's responding well to the medicines. In Saturday's ultrasound she had enormous follicles. Her abdomen is sore for carrying so much.

Leah is responding too well to the medicines. Her ovaries are hyperstimulated. The nurse practitioner told us this on Saturday, after the ultrasound. She prescribed some drugs along with her precautionary antibiotic to reduce the symptoms of the hyperstimulation, but she didn't describe what is going on inside my wife.

What we know is that her body is producing too much estrogen. The doctor reduced her dosage of the Menopur on Friday to only one ampoule twice a day. This is problematic, but we don't know why. According to the nurses, she can get "really sick." The generality of that phrase is more terrifying than anything specific they could tell us.

According to our ultrasound on Sunday, her uterus looks beautiful, which has been a feature of our testing through every cycle. Leah's built to carry children. She has more than a dozen mature follicles. The doctor prescribed the trigger shot for Sunday night. Leah will undergo the egg extraction Tuesday morning, and they'll fertilize the eggs that day. The eggs will mature for four days.

And that's where the plan changes. Our doctors do not want to perform an embryo transfer this month. The amount of estrogen in Leah's blood is too high. The odds are against a successful pregnancy, and should a pregnancy take hold Leah "could get really sick" if her estrogen levels are this high.

I don't know what to feel. The process isn't complete; it's too early for despair. Leah is devastated. She started crying once we left the doctor's office, and when her mother came up from Tucson, she sobbed in her arms. Leah has endured so many disappointments. She wanted to have a baby before she was 30. When it was clear that wasn't possible, she's been motivated to be pregnant before she's 30.

The doctors say that after the egg extraction, she'll get her period in the next two weeks. Then she'll go back on birth control for another month, then go through another cycle where they will shut down her ovaries but closely monitor her uterus and watch her estrogen levels. They talked about estrogen pills and creams.

I'm still in shock. I have difficulty explaining how I feel because I'm not really sure what I think. I feel for Leah, and while she's being brave, I'm afraid her disappointment might poison the few days left we have in the process now. She will heal, but she can't stop fighting even though this battle is more or less lost.

What I know is that I'm still excited. We're repeating or expanding on successes right now. Leah's made multiple follicles before on other cycles; she's responded to these drugs before. But tomorrow we're going to be making a baby. A bunch of them, hopefully. If Leah has 15 follicles, and 10 of them contain viable eggs, and 7 of them create viable embryos, that would mean that by the end of the week Leah and I will have, according to pro-life demonstrators, 7 children.

What I know is that I'm still disappointed. Because those seven "children" are going to be frozen and will have to wait some 12 weeks before they'll be thawed out. And not all of them will survive the process. They say that Fertility Treatment Center has a higher rate of success with frozen embryos than with fresh ones. Because only the strongest embryos survive the process.

In a few days I'll be a dad. Kind of. How can I not be excited?