Month 1 - Time Warp!

Before I start this post, just as quick reminder to VOTE in the Hope Award for Best Blog!! (Mine is a nomination. See the picture on the right...)

I think I'm in some sort of a time warp... or maybe that's just what parenting and sleep deprivation does to you. I can not believe that my babies are 1 month old already but at the same time it feels like they have been here forever.

Here's a picture of them from this past Friday when I tried to get them to sit up next to each other, without crying. M&M is on the left and the Bean Burrito is on the right:

They crack me up... Already they have very distinct personalities.

M&M is our little drama queen. She's very peaceful most of the time, but when she wants something, say like a diaper change or some time at the breast, she goes from a little whimper to a wail very quickly.  Here's her peaceful face. Don't get sucked in, it's deceiving:

The Bean Burrito is a little less likely to get very worked up, but he makes TONS of noises. Lots of grunts and coos and gurgles. Oh, and the facial expressions on him are PRICELESS! He always looks as if there's a lot going on in his head, as if he's really analyzing the world in front of him. Here's one of my favorites:

They are both eating very well and I'm quite thankful that breast feeding is sustaining them right now. They eat every 2 or so hours during the day, mostly because we have started waking them up every 2 hours during the day if they are asleep, in hopes of shifting their longer sleeps into the evening. I know this takes some time to do, but last night we actually got some good results. They both slept for almost 6 hours! This did, however, come after a MARATHON cluster feed from 8pm to midnight last night. Almost 4 hours of continuous feeding!

I spent a lot of time on KellyMom and La Leche League websites trying to understand if there was something wrong, of if this was just some type of phase that they go through and it seems that this cluster feeding is all very normal. So, for now, I'll just resign myself to being a milk pimp for as long as I need. Hopefully the long feed will the result in more consistent longer sleeps, as happened last night.

I think I'm going to have to sign up for Net.Flix to get some good things to watch on my iPad as I spend the evening hours tied to a couch with my double breast feeding pillow and babies in tow...

As for Tidy and I, we are doing well. He is an amazing father. I simply can not say how much more my love for him has grown seeing him be a parent. He has jumped in full force, changing diapers, swaddling, rocking, trying to coddle them and letting me nap or shower. It's been a true partnership and I am very thankful.

On the healing front, I'm finally at a place where I can mostly resume normal activity. They don't want me to run quite yet, but yoga, walking, and even swimming are back on the table! The c-section wound, that was re-open due to infection is getting better each and every day. I won't go into details here of how I have had to take care of it,  but as of now, I can treat it as just a superficial wound... YAY! I will have my 6 week check with my OB a week from Tuesday and hopefully get the all clear to start some type of more vigorous exercise too (when I find time, of course... Ha!)

The exercise will also help me get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, hopefully. As of last week I had lost 25 of the 45 I gained. So only about 20 left to go. I think breast feeding twins is helping too because each day my stomach looks a little smaller... Toned? Not so much...But at least getting back to a more "non pregnant" shape.

That's about all I have right now. My sleep deprived brain is not allowing me to come up with much in the way of whit, so this post ended up being just an update of sorts, but I hope at least you enjoy the pictures.

(Shameless Plug) VOTE FOR ME!!

I'm so very excited! I was nominated this year for the "Best Blog" for Resolve's Hope Award.

The Best Blog award is given to a blog written by someone living with infertility and whose post raises awareness about what life is like when faced with infertility. Each year, during National Infertility Awareness week, bloggers were asked to participate in the "Don't Ignore..." Blogger's unite project.

I submitted this entry, entitled:  Don't Ignore the Ignorance... Educate!  about a suburban town's debate over building a fertility clinic in their bustling main street area, near a school and a church. It was a heated debate and I tried to keep my thoughts away from the religious point of view (which was part of the protestor's arguments), but more so on a comment that one made relating children from fertility treatments as commodities...

It was a heartfelt post, especially during the later stages of my pregnancy when I was getting ready to meet my two beautiful, hard fought for, babies.

Please take some time to visit RESOLVE's website and read all of the entries for this year's Hope Award and place your votes!

I'm honored to be nominated with these other wonderful bloggers! May the best post win!

Don't Ignore the Ignorance... Educate!

In honor of National Infertility Awareness Week (April 22-28) and as an entry into the Bloggers Unite event to help bring awareness to Infertility, I have written this heartfelt post:

A peaceful town was in the news a few weeks ago because a doctor wanted to build a fertility clinic in a vacant space. This space is close to a church, an elementary school and a small college. Protesters came to the city board in hopes of stopping this "immoral place" from being built. One of the organizers of the protest commented that a child born through IVF "becomes a manufactured commodity" and is "reduced to an object, a product."

This sentence enraged me.

I'm currently 30 weeks and 3 days pregnant with twins via donor egg IVF and there is NO WAY that I view these babies as a "product" or "manufactured". I view them as an amazing gift. After a 5 year war with infertility (and I say war, because we went to battle, many many times), we made the not very easy decision to be done with my eggs and try a new route. And once we moved forward, we never looked back. I've been grateful for every. single. moment of this pregnancy and I'm already madly in love with these babies thriving away inside me. I can't wait to meet them, hold them, nurture them.... To me, and my husband, they are very far from "objects".

They are OUR children.

Just because we had to spend over $35,000 to even have this chance at a child on this ONE IVF cycle, in no way shape or form, minimizes their meaning to us. In fact, I would argue, people who go through fertility treatments to have their children, MAY even appreciate the fact that they are parents more so than if they were easy to conceive. (Now I'm not arguing we are better parents here, but just that we understand what it took to get them...and that perspective is very special.)

But then I tried to calm down a bit and think this through, or at least put myself in these protesters shoes. I understand why IVF and third party reproduction scare people and why some consider it unnatural. They are right. IVF was not the way nature intended children to be conceived. (I would say, though, that nature gave us all very intelligent brains and thus doctors, the ability to create these amazing processes that have helped many of us become parents)

But I believe that some media and a lack of awareness/education has a lot to do with this fear. Stories in the news can make IVF appear as a freakish thing that creates octo-moms and fabricates babies in places where "god didn't intend" a baby to be. This misrepresentation creates ignorance and fear.

Specifically, it causes people to make ignorant statements about IVF babies as commodities...

Ridiculous.

Fertility clinics are certainly not manufacturing babies. They are actually helping to create THE POTENTIAL for a baby to be born. With all of the time, money and effort that goes into taking eggs from a woman and sperm from a man, joining them in the lab, and then putting a few resulting embryos  back in the woman, fertility clinics still have not created a baby! Those embryos have to decide to snuggle in tight and stick around for 8 more months before a baby enters the world. And there is no fertility clinic that can gaurantee the success of the last part.

Through the four IVF cycles with my body, our fertility clinic helped us produce over 55 embryos... and not ONE of them turned into a baby. Not one. I bought the chance to have a baby, many times over, but we certainly did not buy a baby. If it were that easy, to just go out and buy a baby when we faced with the disease of infertility, would so many of us need the support of this community? Would so many of us want to build awareness and educate others that it is OK to need help?

If only I could meet these protesters and tell them my story. Maybe then they would see how their ignorance only hurts those of us who need help to experience the joy of having a baby. Maybe they would see how truly life altering and devastating it is to be infertile and feel isolated, depressed, anxious, and hopeless.  Maybe they would see how much I am in love with my babies already, how grateful I am and how they are not simply a commodity to me.

For those of you who would like to learn more about NIAW and the basics of the disease of infertility, please click on the links. The more you know, and educate yourselves, the more you can educate others.

Please pass this along!!

Shamless Plug - NEED YOUR VOTE!

I have been humbled today.... big time.

I have been nominated, along with 3 other amazing bloggers for the Team RESOLVE Choice Award's Best Blog, which, if I win, will be awarded to me at the RESOLVE Night of Hope in September in NYC. I'm SOOOO humbled and excited and simply can't believe that one of my rantings was powerful enough to rise to the top for this nomination.

And after a somewhat hard week emotionally, this makes me feel like I'm doing something right.

The award is a result of a post I wrote during National Infertility Awareness Week, RESOLVE put an calling out to all infertility bloggers to "Bust a Myth"? Well, I chose to bust a myth about insurance coverage for infertility. And it seems that my post was good enough for this award.

Did you know that one of my dreams is to get up and talk in front of large groups of people about  my journey and share my story to let others know that they are not alone and they CAN get through this, and as hard as it may be, they will survive? And also to educate others on how infertility affects your whole life?

If I win this award, I will get to do just that. One of my dreams could come true :-)

So with that, I will put in my shamless plug and ask you all to please vote for me here, pretty please?? That is, assuming you think my post is the best of the 4 out there. Regardless, please have a look and place your vote. It will be open until July 11th.

And a big thank you goes out to those of you who nominated my blog. I'm just so humbled. That's the best word I can think to describe how this feels.

Busting an Infertility Myth: Infertility treatments are covered by insurance

For National Infertility Awareness week, which ends tomorrow, RESOLVE is asking bloggers to "Bust a Myth" about infertility. I've chosen to talk about the myth that infertility treatments are covered by insurance. Resolve's "bust" to this myth can be found here . Below is mine:

Myth: Infertility Treatments are covered by insurance

Fact: Not in my state and not in most others in the U.S.

I live in a state where infertility insurance coverage is not mandatory. My HMO has a little coverage and I burned through it many years ago. It consisted of a LIFETIME maximum of $4000 towards infertility treatments, which ran out with my first IUI after initial doctor visits and all of the fun testing one goes through (day 3 bloodwork, HSGs, invasive ultrasounds...). If you look back on my history, that was a long time ago. Oh, and I forgot to mention the 50% co-pay for infertility treatments, so really it amounted to $2000 of lifetime coverage, not $4000. We've been paying 100% out of pocket ever since IUI #2.

Now, Tidy and I are fortunate enough to have well enough paying jobs and not too many other financial obligations other than a mortgage and some student loans. Because of this we haven't had to put ourselves into long term debt for the treatments we have done up to this point. But, by "afford", I mean that we are able to come up with enough money to pay for the treatments, but we are not able to save for our other long term goals nor able to improve the house that we bought with a family in mind over 4 years ago. The basement remodel, new windows and other upgrades and fixes are on hold... indefinitely. We do not have an endless supply of cash just sitting around to try one treatment after another and if those fail, move on to adoption, which is also no drop in the bucket.

So, over the last 3 years, because we are now paying 100% out of pocket, here are some of the tactics I've taken to help save on little bits of the cost of 5 IUIs, 4 IVFs, 1 laparoscopic surgery and endless amounts of doctor appointments, blood draws and other invasive tests along the way:

• I've asked others who have had success with unused meds to donate them to my cause and have stock piled half used pens and vials of follistim, gonal-f, menopur, lupron and progesterone.
• I've researched and found a clinical trial to get an IVF cycle AND MEDS free of charge. However I did have to drive 160 miles each way to the clinic, sometimes 2 days in a row, pay for parking, take 2 weeks off work and impose on my sisters in the city to participate in it. So, "free" may not be quite accurate. Additionally, the protocol wasn't optimal for my body, as many clinical trials have standardized protocols, so it was basically a disaster and an emotional nightmare.
• I've cried and whined to my primary care doctor to get certain tests run through her so is covered under anything other than the category of infertility and I didn't have to pay the $2-3K for immune workups that other labs charge. I also had to convince an OB in my network to order an exploratory laparoscopy for "pelvic pain" with out any other real indication of need other than multiple failed IVFs and a suspicion of endometriosis. I felt very manipulative.
• I've maxed out my health spending account at work for a few years to get some money tax free. Currently my paychecks are about $250 smaller than they would be otherwise.
• I've taken out at least two 0%-interest credit cards and put large sums of $$ on them in hopes of paying it off before interest starts accruing. I am ruining my credit history just because I don't have insurance coverage for infertility treatments, not because I am financially irresponsible.
• I've considered looking for a job in a different state that does have mandatory IVF coverage but there's no way we could sell our house right now in this market with the things that need to be upgraded and fixed.
• I've risked having multiples by transfering up to 4 embryos back into my body because with out coverage, and lack of funds to do another IVF or a different path for quite some time, I'd rather get more bang for my buck (ie, hope for twins), or at least increase the chances that it will work. Here's a great article that says how insurance coverage for IVF will actually help the health care system save money in the long run, because single embryos transfers would be the norm and the health care system wouldn't be as burdened with such a huge increase in multiples births that require expensive pre-natal, neo-natal and ante-natal care.

These "creative ways" to save us a little money and get more information about why we haven't been able to conceive yet don't even begin to include the emotional costs on me, Tidy and our relationship that comes along with this great financial burden and struggle to understand what our next steps should be.

And that brings up one last point. We're at the point of our 4th failed IVF cycle, but we really have NO answers. I make pretty decent "looking" eggs and they fertilize well. My uterus is healthy looking. The only other thing that could be wrong is either my body is rejecting the embryos for some unknown reason, or our embryos are chromosomally abnormal. We can't really test for the first and to test for the second (genetic testing on the embryos) will require and additional $6000 on top of a regular IVF cycle. We also have no gaurantee that the embryos would make it long enough to get to a stage where they can be tested. So I'm faced with ASSUMING our embryos are abnormal and jumping into a donor egg IVF cycle. There is, however, always the possibility that it's not my eggs but my uterus. So our next step, which could end up costing about $30K is a HUGE gamble. If we did have some insurance coverage, we would have done the genetic on the embryos sooner and had a bit more knowledge to help us make our decision. Right now, I still feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark.

So, no, infertility treatments are NOT covered by insurance, but more of them should be. And I can make a good case for it.

To end, here are a few great links about Infertility 101 and also National Infertiltiy Awareness Week background.