If you have been following the blog for a while you may recall a blog post about genetic testing and our (read 'my') need to have more children in our life. If you would like to catch up or re-read about the sagas of genetic testing and then actually getting the results back you can read here and here.
We did finally have our appointment in December but it has taken me this long to bury my head in the sand, come out long enough to mention to Mum that we had had it, put my head back in the sand, mull it over for a while, probe my husband for his thoughts, mull some more and then finally have an adult conversation with Steven about it......and now I'm here....sharing it with strangers. Why? Because this is the place where I can be real. And posting stuff here is sometimes very cathartic....Sometimes.
After a huge build up of cancelled appointments and missing results we are no better off. There. It's said....now I can go eat chocolate. Oh, you want more than that? Okay then.
We saw an independent Geneticist who said that they were able to find nothing out of the ordinary in Ayla's testing. Sounds good, doesn't it? It's not. The key words here are "able to find". The testing is only so good and if they were able to look further it's likely that they would find something. But they're not able to at this point and who knows how long until they can. The Geneticist did, however, say that he felt our chances of recurrence were more likely in the vicinity of 1 in 10 rather than 1 in 4. It's not really much better if you ask me. He said that Bilateral Frontal Polymicrogyria is rare.....and then I very gently reminded him that rare things happen....clearly. Around the same time as this appointment we were also reminded that lightning does in fact, strike twice. A friend of ours who has a little boy with a disability due to premature birth went into premature labour again. Even earlier than with her son and this new baby, a little girl, has had a major brain bleed. Apparently, the news for the future is looking very challenging. Yes, this is a very different situation to ours. But when in 'our situation', it's rather confronting.
So where does that leave us? Right back at our original spot of having to choose not to have another. There are options....lots of different options. It's funny (not ha ha funny) that none of these options come without the possibility of some pretty heavy emotional tolls on one or both of us....and possibly others if we gain enough courage to ask. Just stuff we need to work through I guess.
One of the options is ringing loudly in my head and that option is one of donor gamete/s. In other words donor egg and/or donor sperm. So f*%$ing clinical. It's not meant to be this way. Babies are supposed to made in the moment that 2 individuals share absolute and unconditional love, not in a test tube!! But it may be the only way. We're kinda leaning toward donor egg. It's my feeling that men really struggle to bond with babies in utero and even in the first few months whereas women tend to begin their bonding from the moment they realise they are pregnant. I'd like to think that using Steven's sperm would make the bonding easier on him.
Then again, donor eggs aren't just available like sperm is. It's such a process that a woman has to go through to have her eggs 'harvested' - nice huh? Apparently, the wait can be 2 or more years unless we have a willing donor. To be honest, I think I would prefer to know my donor rather than go anonymous but then you are led into a whole other realm of emotional STUFF. How do you ask someone....Hey! Can you go through months of hormone treatment, possibly put on weight and go through some serious mood swings and then at the end of all that, let a specialist likely to have the bedside manner of gnat, harvest your eggs to give to me? It's not the easiest question. And I am more than a little aware that, although 'the chosen one' may be absolutely willing, there is still some pretty heavy STUFF that she will need to work through.
So, that's where we are at. Teetering on a precipice. Hoping that the decisions we make aren't selfish, messy or thoughtless to one another, to Ayla or to anyone else.
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