Yay! Our image for the weeks changed from a bundle of cells to this ummmm cute? thing that we are growing. Its a hybrid between a tadpole and a shrimp and in a few months, it will be come a cute chubby baby!
Ohhhhh remedies for morning sickness. Perfect timing! I sip ginger tea all day. Capsules? Interesting. My OB called in B6 to take three times a day. So I will be picking that up tomorrow. I love her natural approach with medical care.
When the agency owner heard I was pretty ill, she sent me this package. They just got here today. Who knew that ginger was so spicy? They definitely have a large amount of ginger in them so I will be sure to tuck some of these in my purse for when I am out and about and feeling queasy!
If we had an ultrasound, this is what we would see right now-- the yolk sac and maybe a little blob of baby!
The blob being the size of an orange seed!
They think I waited until now to start peeing on test strips? They don't know me very well! And nope, no terror about this pregnancy, just sheer bliss that I get to gestate the baby and someone else gets to wake up with it! Perfect combination!!
Heart and brain and spinal cord are starting to form! Science is so amazing!
So just a little more on the surrogacy side - Yesterday the Nurse Coordinator from the IVF clinic called me and said that results were beautiful but that she would like for me to have another beta done tomorrow as it was clinic standard. So I will run back over to the hospital and have that drawn in the morning and report those results tomorrow afternoon! Then a week and a half wait for the ultrasound!
Next up the non-surro stuff. On the Friday after transfer (April 17) the little teacup hitched a ride to the In Their Boots Day! It is a event on the Marine Corps Base where you get to do simulators that Marines do for training. We got to shoot guns (and by shoot guns, I mean they were air powered so no chance of lead poisoning like you might have with real firearms). The first stop was the shooting simulator where we got to shoot targets on a screen. Turns out that I am a real hot shot and was one of the best shooters that day!
Gold team was the best!!
Not too shabby 11 targets hit with 14 shots fired!
The one wayward shot on the right (green one) was the instructor discharging the last shot in the weapon (the air canister had run out). But the rest of my shots were pretty close to the target on the hand gun.
This weapon was one that you would find mounted on the top of a humvee. This thing would rock your world. It shook bad when you were shooting!
Bestie selfie! This lady is such a ray of light in my life! She is also the Family Readiness Officer for the Battalion but we have become great friends over these last few years!
Next up was lunchtime! Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) are a staple for the Marines in the field! All of this meal fit into a package the same size as a box of legal envelopes. And Chow wouldn't be complete without trading your hot sauce for gum or your pound cake for dense brownies!
This is a great video about civilians trying MREs for the first time! Its interesting to see how civilians feel about MREs and it was quite entertaining.
After chow, we checked out the Humvee and MRAP rollover simulator. In this, they strap Marines in with their weapons and turn them this way and that way and then come over the speaker and say that someone is injured and needs help getting to safety inside the vehicle so the others must help. Then they have to put black out goggles on and be able to reach safety with no visual help! Also there may be a gunner in the turret so the Marines inside the vehicles must pull this guy down to safety in the event of a roll over. The picture of me is going to check out a bird's eye view out the top of the simulator. We didn't get to actually 'ride' in it, just check it out in a stationary position.
Finally, we got to get into a humvee simulator where it was a 360 screen. The humvee was driven by the driver in this simulator and three of our drivers got motion sick. You would actually have to put the vehicle in gear, turn the wheel, it just didn't actually move-- just the scene in this room. Also the rooms were all connected with each other and the other room's humvees so we were all driving around Fallujah at the same time. You had to shoot at adversaries (again with air guns) then hop back into the humvee.
So this was a very interesting day for us! We got to 'play' Marine while being safe. It was a ton of fun! So that is all about the personal side of me! I just wanted to share some of the things we get to do as military spouses!
Okay so this is a silly one. We got to handle a lot of weapons that I have never seen before. This is one of my favorite women!! Anna. She has the best disposition on a woman I have ever met and I love her sweaty hugs after a run with the Stroller Warriors!!!
Went over to Naval and had the blood drawn during a mass casualty exercise. The military does these incidents occasionally where they act like something has happened to prepare for mission readiness. This time they acted like an EOD went off on New River (the adjoining Marine Corps Air Station) and they were bringing patients to the ERs on base and out in town. They put rouge on the patients. This allows for the military to be prepared if this really did happen and also the hospitals to see if their resources would be overpowered by such an event. Makes me miss EMS/Fire that much more!
So then I went to a meeting and came back to the hospital to get results!
Our number is perfect and the doubling time was 46.33 hours which the doctors like it to be at least every 48.72 hours so that makes us perfectly normal for our doubling rates. A much faster rate can be indicative multiples and a much lower rate can mean the pregnancy is in peril.
My doctor did call me with results not long after I got home and is also calling me in B6 to take 3 times a day to help try to mellow out this all day (and night!) sickness!
First I woke to a sweet email from my IM -- even though they may be on a completely different continent, it never feels like they are far away! They always message me checking in on me, especially on days that I have appointments or something going on.
I had the blood drawn this morning at 9 and I have been waiting, tapping my fingers all day... I just knew when I stopped by my doctor's front desk this morning and saw that her name was not on the schedule today that I would not be getting results back! So I did some school work, tried to take a nap, a little house work and then I went to pick up Weston from school. I had already tried to call my Doctor's office to have these results faxed to the RE's office but they seemed perturbed as to why I was calling-- much like the girl this morning at the front desk. She just wasn't grasping that my PCM had put the order into the system for another ordering physician and that my doctor didn't actually need the results. Long story short, I think my results are sitting on my doctor's desk to sign off on when she returns because in the system, she was the ordering physician. So I chose to drive over there today after I picked up Weston and get the results from medical records!!
I immediately emailed E&L first because they will always be the first to know everything about their little teacup growing (yep, I chose a new nickname since I nurse tea all day now!)
So here it is -- our wonderful results!
One of the first questions I get when I tell of any news relating to the cycle is 'What do the parents think?' So I thought it might be neat to give their responses:
L's (IM) Response -- I can always count on hers to be excited and warm and supportive!
E's (IF) Response -- His is always witty and funny and cracks me up! (And he used our very southern term of y'all - I am not even sure that exists in England?!)
I emailed the results to the nurse coordinator that was waiting for them and she called me very excited. She said she wanted to see a number higher than 150 so we are past that! She also made the comment that the old cliche goes 'It only takes one!' We certainly beat all odds with this one little embryo and we are completely blessed that we were able to give that little embryo a chance!
So 'What next?' as there is always something next in surrogacy! We have another beta on Wednesday to make sure it is doubling correctly. If it doubles correctly, it should be somewhere between 785-946 (obviously these are very scientific numbers!) Sometimes doubling faster can be indicative of twins and sometimes doubling slower can be indicative of a slow grower or even problems like a chemical. The doctors want to see the numbers double by 48-72 hours or they may order another beta to keep a close eye on it rising.
My lovely and oh so supportive friends keep throwing this word around... twins!! Because I got early tests and my sickness came on quickly. But I believe our number is firmly in the singleton category which is what all parties wanted -- a single healthy baby. But for the sake of educating, I am posting some charts from betabase.info to show what normal betas are for singletons and for twins. They have triplets there too but if my number was anywhere near what triplets were, you might just have to hold me up from passing out!
The median for 18dpo (13dp5dt -- you add those numbers together to get your days past ovulation) is 579. That is the average result for the 2,746 women who recorded their result. The lowest reported was 19 and the highest for a SINGLETON pregnancy was 12,318. Our number is pretty close to the median number so we fit so nicely into having just one single baby tucked inside of my uterus for the next 8 months.
Again, the median for 18dpo is 1,140 with the highest reported as 9,289 and the lowest at 40. hCG levels can vary so much from woman to woman. Could it be twins, sure. But one single hCG number does not indicate that so I am sticking to my single-story.
I also wanted to touch on twins and how they are more common in IVF. When speaking of twins, there are two different types-- fraternal and identical. Fraternal twins are more common in natural pregnancies than identical twins are and they can also be genetic or 'run in the family'. Fraternal twins are when two separate eggs are released and fertilized or in the case of IVF, more than one embryo is transferred to the waiting womb. These two babies never share a placenta or a sac.
In the case of identical twins, there are 4 different types-- di/di, mo/di, mo/mo and conjoined. Identical twins are a phenomenon in nature and scientists are not 100% sure what causes them to happen. There are some theories depending on the type of twins they are as to why it happened. The different types of twins happen at different periods of the embryonic stage. For simplicity sake, I am including an image to help describe this better than my words will.
If the embryo splits in the first 3 days after it is fertilized, then the babies are di/di twins meaning they each have their own placenta and their own sac. This is obviously the safest type of twins.
Next are mo/di twins. This is when the embryo is cleaved around 4-8 days after the egg is fertilized. This is more common from what I read in mothers/egg donors who are advanced maternal age. The reason the doctors say this is more common in AMA is because the egg shell is harder/more tough and may cleave the blast as it is hatching out of the shell into two different pieces thus making two babies. These twins share a placenta but have their own sacs. They have a pretty normal twin pregnancy (if normal is a word with twins!) with less high risks.
Once the blast has implanted into the uterine lining, if it is then cleaved or separated (days 8-13 after fertilization) then these are known as mo/mo twins. They share both a placenta and sac. This is nearly always a high risk pregnancy. The babies have the chance to have their umbilical cords get wrapped up in each other and could cause the blood/nutrient flow to stop if they are entangled too much. Also the risk of twin-to-twin-transfusion is high with this type of pregnancy as well due to the sharing of the placenta and sac. Sometimes one twin will get all of the nutrient flow and the other will not causing a huge discrepancy in weight during growth. Usually mo/mo pregnancies will end up on hospital bedrest to monitor the babies growth and to help monitor change in cervix and other things during this pregnancy.
Of course conjoined twins have the highest risk but fortunately they are the least common. These embryos don't cleave until days 13-15 and with this, they share a placenta, sac and some body parts-- some even share a heart so it would be deadly to separate them after birth.
As always, I am still learning, even though I have been a student of surrogacy for 8 years so if you ever see anything that is not quite right, please let me know so I can correct it!
Finally, the dreaded shots. I have about 7 more weeks to go on these-- I have been on the estrogen for almost 5 weeks and I have been on the progesterone shots for about 3 weeks now. I have muscle soreness that hurts but I am trucking right through it. I got some advice of running with these muscles knotted up so I am foam rolling these muscles too! But I recently had a shot that somehow went awry and got a knot and bruised! Ouch! Tonight I go back to that side, hopefully it is not awful to do a shot back at this location again! The less savory side of surrogacy -- the backside!!
I will be sure to update ASAP on Wednesday when I have the second beta results! I still have to post my photos from the teacups first adventure -- In Their Boots Day with the Bn where I got to go to shooting simulators and 'ride' in a Humvee to see what our Marines do when learning to do their job!
As crazy as this sounds, I wasted pee this morning-- meaning I did not test! I thought yesterday's test was enough confirmation that maybe I should stop testing!
Upon a little research, I found out that it looks like the lowest beta that this test will register as 2-3 weeks pregnant is around 156. Here is the link I found this information from just for research sake!
For my readers that may use these tests in the future, here are the levels for the different weeks shown on the display Less than 10, Negative 11-155 1-2 weeks post ovulation 156-2599 2-3 weeks post ovulation 2600+ is 3weeks+
We had just turned 4 weeks pregnant (or 2 weeks past ovulation as the test reads) the day before. The levels that the test will read are 1-2 weeks past ovulation, 2-3 weeks past ovulation or 3+ weeks past ovulation. So this test reading means we are on the higher end of normal which is great! If we had the lowest beta possible to be read, then by Monday, we should be expecting a beta of about 450 or higher. I do plan to use a test or two the morning of the betas so I can compare the tests with the number.
And just to confirm, I used about 37 different tests and every type had a positive!
Also, morning sickness has taken me by surprise this time--- wayyyy too early! I didnt start sickness until probably 6 weeks in the past--but this time, apparently the sickness can be amplified with the hormone injections. Just general malaise and heaving all day long. Grandma in the UK used ginger tea so L suggested that to me. So I went on a quest yesterday and purchased ginger lemon tea bags, ginger roots and a tea diffuser. So far so good. Thursday was awful, yesterday was bad, today seems to be better. But when I get up and moving, it brings on the heaving. I think I should just hang out on the couch and veg!
Here are some little updates to see what is going on with this little jelly bean (by the way, I was calling it jelly bean yesterday before the Stroller Warriors work out and they had jelly beans there. First one was lemon, yummy. Next was a berry one. Then I popped a black licorice bean in there and blech I heaved in front of everyone :( So maybe I will have to think of another nickname other than jelly bean. Taking suggestions!
This app is so cool because it shows what the baby looks like and best of all, it let me sign up as the mother's friend instead of just the parent so looking at it saying "Your friend's baby is..." is really cool!
More info about the embryo growing into a baby and also what is going on
inside of me! (This app didn't let me select someone else as being
pregnant though)
Also -- I was able to schedule the ultrasound locally and that will be done on May 12. So exciting for this to come along but it seems so far away! Next up, beta results on Monday & Wednesday but I won't post the results until E&L know the results -- after all it is their baby :D
Hurry up and wait So close, but so far away Everything that you've always dreamed of Close enough for you to taste But you just can't touch
You wanna show the world, but no one knows your name yet Wonder when and where and how you're gonna make it You know you can if you get the chance In your face as the door keeps slamming Now you're feeling more and more frustrated And you're getting all kind of impatient waiting
Not even the first day i was POAS! I started that at 3dpt to get it out of my system. I thought I saw something on this test but I really was not sure!?
We live and we learn to take One step at a time There's no need to rush It's like learning to fly Or falling in love It's gonna happen when it's Supposed to happen and we Find the reasons why One step at a time
When you are unsure, you keep peeing!!! This one was another -- is it there? If I put a finger pointing to it, it must be so! This one was actually at 4.25 -- the photo is mislabled!
You believe and you doubt You're confused, you got it all figured out Everything that you always wished for Could be yours, should be yours, would be yours If they only knew
If there is a line on a FRED (First Response Early Detection) then it must be true!! Totally knocked up and time to tell the IPs!
So I sent them an email that said "Happy Sunday-- Looks like we swapped weather. It is raining here and blah blah blah. Check out the beautiful photo of my family that I attached"
Except it wasn't my family! It was the start of their family. I sent the tests earlier than I usually would have as I got a negative digital test that morning since it was so early, but they were home together so I wanted them to celebrate together -- and that they did-- over a nice cup of tea!
To which I got this response:
If you ever wondered WHY I am so passionate about surrogacy -- It is this right here!!
You wanna show the world, but no one knows your name yet Wonder when and where and how you're gonna make it You know you can if you get the chance In your face as the door keeps slamming Now you're feeling more and more frustrated And you're getting all kind of impatient waiting
Progression of tests getting darker -- only compare like tests to each other because of the varying sensitivity.
When you can't wait any longer But there's no end in sight when you need to find the strength It's your faith that makes you stronger The only way you get there Is one step at a time
Digitals are so sensitive in the beginning -- it took me 4 to get the video above done!!
We live and we learn to take One step at a time There's no need to rush It's like learning to fly Or falling in love It's gonna happen when it's Supposed to happen and we Find the reasons why One step at a time
Blue dye tests are the devil! They often have false negatives and positives-- how? I still had 3 left so I must pee on all things!!!
We live and we learn to take One step at a time There's no need to rush It's like learning to fly Or falling in love It's gonna happen when it's Supposed to happen and we Find the reasons why One step at a time
Yes -- this means we are cautiously optimistic! As of right now, we are pregnant! I want to let all of my readers know just how optimistic I am. I am elated. I am ecstatic but I am also a realist. My past journeys have left me feeling the 'what ifs?' I am pretty sure that most surrogates feel this way at some point! Like this is too good to be true! I have had a miscarriage and a blighted ovum with past surrogacy attempts so I feel that right now, I cannot feel relaxed and quite honestly, I probably won't feel completely relaxed until E&L and baby are back in their home country many many months from now!
I also want to educate my readers on what the possible scenarios are. On Monday April 27 and Wednesday April 29, I will have a quantitative beta done. This blood test will tell us how much of the pregnancy hormone hCG is in my blood. The placenta portion of the embryo begins making this hormone when it implants and then the placenta takes over. In early pregnancy, the hCG or beta should double in about 48-72 hours. Meaning if it is 100 on Monday, it should be around 200 on Wednesday and 400 by Friday. (this is just a random number)
If the number does not double normally, then the pregnancy can be what professionals consider a chemical pregnancy. A chemical is essentially a pregnancy that ceases to grow to the point of being able to see anything on an ultrasound. Generally this happens before the 5th week of pregnancy. This is usually picked up during hCG testing. The numbers will be slow to rise/double or they will be at a certain number and start decreasing slowly. This is one of the reasons surrogates test so much. We probably shouldn't but if you continue testing until your second beta, you might be able to tell if a chemical might happen if the tests get rapidly lighter. Usually if this happens, the injectible hormones are stopped and the pregnancy passes naturally. The RE follows that beta back to 0 before trying again. Chemical pregnancy is usually caused by a chromosomal issue according to Mayo Clinic. Fortunately, this embryo was tested and genetically normal so our chances of this happening are at least slightly lower.
A blighted ovum is when there is a visible sac is on ultrasound and the embryo implants into the endometrial lining, but it stops growing before a heartbeat is visible. This pregnancy starts out normally and hCG doubles normally but then just stops growing past the embryonic stage. Sometimes REs stop medication and again this pregnancy is passed naturally. Sometimes a D&C is required which is a surgical intervention to remove the pregnancy from the uterus. These are also usually chromosonal issues with the embryo to cause these.
There are also miscarriages. This is the loss of a pregnancy anytime between the start of the heartbeat and the age of viability (which at a hospital with a high level NICU is now after 22 weeks!) There isn't always an explanation for why these happen but sometimes it can be genetically abnormal embryos. Sometimes it is low progesterone, incompetent cervix, or other uterine related issues.
And of course there is the last scenario-- a happy and healthy 9 month pregnancy where a healthy baby is delivered to his/her parents and everyone goes home with the warm and fuzzies. I am totally going for the last scenario and I am feeling optimistic that this is it and we will be successful!!
Sorry for holding out on the results for so long. I had technological issues with taking the video. The first one I took was sideways. The second one I took, I was (am!) still very early and the urine was diluted from drinking so much water so it came up negative after all of that preparation. So I had to wait until my levels of hCG got higher. Each test has a different level that it starts reading as positive or makes a line. Cheaper tests usually have a lower level. I did start getting positives at 4.25dpt, but I wasn't sure if I was seeing things or not! So I waited, and kept peeing, and waited and kept peeing. Like any good surrogate does! So when I finally got the video recorded, I added the song and my computer wouldn't recognize my phone. So my husband put it on our network for me except the song didn't stay with the video so I had to make a video on my computer and add a song. See peeing on a stick is far more than just peeing on a stick!!
So while we are taking this one step at a time, here are the next steps:
Beta on 4-27 and 4-29 Ultrasound to see heartbeat around 5-12 when we will be about 7 weeks pregnant Mark you calendars-- this baby will be due around December 30!
