love is blonde

I can’t decide if I should tell the story from the beginning or from the end, but in case you read nothing else in this post, or you’re not really a fan of medical details, all you need to know is that I am going to have a baby. In November. And it’s a boy.

The whole thing seems both completely normal and completely implausible all at once. Let’s go back to February or so. At this point in our babymaking journey, we had learned that: 1.) We were not good at making or keeping babies on our own, 2.) My otherwise perfect husband has some kinda messed up genetic material that make things extremely difficult, and 3.) I had my own issues that were complicating things, namely that our fertility specialist thought that my fallopian tubes would not work.

(Basically we were operating with ONE perfectly functioning thing – ovaries. But did you know babymaking takes more than just ovaries? Yes indeed.)

All of these things combined, our doctor gave us a nearly zero chance of success without IVF, or IVF with genetic testing, and maybe even IVF with a donor. But my insurance doesn’t cover IVF so we decided to try a medicated IUI cycle. On Day 3 of the cycle our doctor actually called and recommended that we cancel, because it really was not going to work. But I had already bought the drugs, and the rest of it was free. We chose to go forward instead.

Meanwhile, during that cycle, we set up consultation visits with a slew of experts. We met with the doc about IVF. We met with the genetics guy about embryo testing. We met with the financial counselor. We met with the social worker about using a donor. We were prepared to move on to the big guns for the next cycle, even if thinking about the financial, physical, and emotional toll it would take was keeping us up at night.

So, [skipping some details here, you can google IUI if you want to know the deets] a few weeks pass and I find myself staring in disbelief at a very faint positive pregnancy test. But I’ve seen these before, and they normally don’t last. I went in for blood work, and the result was a “low positive.” I kept peeing on sticks and kept going back for bloodwork, usually with a good-but-not-great result. After my fifth blood test, I met only the minimum requirements for a viable pregnancy when my levels didn’t double.

But we somehow kept moving forward. The first ultrasound showed almost nothing—but not nothing! There was a small sac. The second one showed what looked to me like a piece of lint. (A very cute piece of lint though.) The third one showed a tiny, flickering heartbeat, so small it couldn’t be measured. The fourth one showed a great heartbeat but a fetus that was measuring behind. The fifth one showed a still-small baby and a small sac. (You don’t even want to know what Dr. Google says about small gestational sacs. It’s really not good.) At every appointment, I got 80% good news and 20% worrying news. You can probably guess which part I was more focused on.

Eventually we made it all the way to 12 weeks, and by this point some of the anxiety had gone away. We opted to do genetic testing just to make sure that we hadn’t passed down anything that would show up later on and make it so this baby was not going to be able to survive.

We waited a week for the test results. It felt like a loooooooong week. Just last week we got the news that our baby – our baby boy – has 46 completely normal chromosomes. He is already a one in a million little guy, when you consider the odds we were facing right before he was created.

So, I’ve been keeping a secret from you for months. And I am so excited to be sharing it now. Be glad you missed the last few months, when I was a hot mess of barfy anxiety exhaustion, all rolled up together. But now I am feeling good, very mellow, and really damn happy.