Miracle Baby #3! Coming December 2016!

It is so crazy to me that we will have 3 kids by the end of the year when 6 years ago I was sitting in a doctor’s office feeling like we wouldn’t ever be able to afford a single IVF treatment. We are so excited and truly feel so blessed every day.

This past September, we had the opportunity to stay with James in Washington DC while he was doing a rotation. We had been in DC for about 3 weeks when I got a message from another Footsteps for Fertility grant recipient asking if we were going to do a study that Idaho Center for Reproductive Medicine was participating in. At the time, having another baby was not even on our radar. We just had planned to wait until we were on Tricare, at a military base that does fertility treatments, anything to help curb the cost of another IVF cycle. My friend told me that it was only $4500 including medications if we qualified.  With insurance, I’ve generally paid over $2000 for medications alone so this was an amazing deal. James and I talked about it that night and the next day I had talked with the doctor, changed our flights home, and had plans to get started.

We had to do a series of blood tests, interviews, etc to make sure we qualified. We were pretty confident that we would qualify because we had taken all of these tests before and fit their qualifications, they just needed more recent tests. The only test we were worried about was James’ semen analysis. I only give you all those great details because we hadn’t done one since his last cycle of chemo and we knew that it has the ability to make men sterile. We literally only had to have one sperm to qualify and our nurse was literally in shock when she called to let us know that we only had 1 motile sperm and so we were officially able to participate in the study.  Maybe we should had realized then that something was wrong with James again but we were just excited we qualified. I also had to quit nursing Hudson cold turkey but we both got over that pretty quick!

So we were all set and ready to start medications around March 1^st and the last week of March we found out James’ cancer was back. After talking it over quite a bit James and I both agreed that we should just go for it anyway. We have lots of people around us to help if we need it and other than the freak blood clot with Hudson my pregnancies have been pretty easy so we would be ok. We ended up starting medications a couple weeks later and the timing of everything just worked out as perfectly as it could.

Luckily this time I responded really slowly to the stimulation medications, which helped me to avoid all the problems I had when we got pregnant with Hudson. It also helped keep us in the study. Part of their stipulations were that if your estrogen levels go over 5000 you have to be dropped from the study and pay for a frozen transfer later, which we really wanted to avoid. When I did my egg retrieval for Hudson, my levels were around 8000. So thankfully my doctor was really great about avoiding that this time and everything went so well.

We were so excited to hear that we were pregnant 2 weeks later and I had very little hyperstimulation, I only looked like 20 weeks pregnant instead of 40 this time, haha. Also part of this study was that they did genetic testing on all of our embryos, which enabled us to find out just 2 weeks after that that we’re having a baby girl! We also know that we have 1 more girl frozen if we decide to have any more in the future, which is super weird to know and makes me really glad that we never did genetic testing before. I’m also glad we don’t have any “choice” in the sex of our baby, I know a lot of people do and that is great for them but it’s just too weird for me to think about. I would stress way too much about a decision like that.

It really is so crazy to look at the whole situation and how timing is everything. When James found out he had cancer again I was just thinking why could this not have happened like 3 or 4 months ago when we weren’t getting ready to do IVF, move across the country, start a whole new crazy life?! And that’s when I remembered our 1 sperm (I know, it’s random) but had he had the cancer sooner, we wouldn’t have had a single one and we wouldn’t have qualified for the study. Timing is everything. God has a plan that is perfect, even when we don’t understand.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. –Proverbs 3:5-6