Why are there no English words that rhyme with orange? Who built the Egyptian pyramids, and how?  Was there life on Mars at one time?  There are so many unknowable things, and I find it overwhelming to focus on.   Our fertility problems are “unexplained ” there have been some intelligent hunches but nothing definitive. In French there is a word that rhymes with orange, it’s change. Both words are pronounced with the same “ahnge” sound. Segue to talking about change. Often times change is thrust upon us without our consent. Other times change is chosen and it’s often because what we are leaving behind is not serving it’s purpose anymore.  The change we are making is for neither of those reasons, somewhere in between and I’d like to say it makes me very sad. 

Quarantine upon arrival in Barbados is becoming cost prohibitive. We have already made 3 trips to the island, two with quarantine weeks. IVF in Barbados is no longer financially responsible for us, isn’t that terribly sad? Who could have guessed that it would take this long for us to get pregnant with IVF, 1 trip to Prague and 3 to Barbados? I hope that all my friends can get pregnant at home, or maybe on vacation, that when you call to tell me the good news no science was involved in the making of your baby. No transvaginal ultrasound, no cervical catheter, no self administered injections. Just a little romp and then poof two pink lines. IVF is the coolest club with the most fabulous members, and I hope you do not have to join it.

There is one thing we can do that we haven’t done that is thought to increase the chances of getting pregnant, it’s pretty expensive and that’s why we haven’t done it yet. It’s a thing they do in the lab where they take a wee tiny biopsy of each embryo and send it off for testing to see if it is genetically capable of life. It does not guarantee that we will get pregnant but it can detect which embryos have the chromosomes that lead to life. It is thought that 50% of miscarriages are due to genetic abnormalities, this testing will detect those abnormalities and help us to transfer embryos that are more likely to make it. The clinic freezes the embryos while the testing of the biopsy is being done, it takes about 30 days. Then you do a frozen embryo transfer the following month or whenever you are ready. This means two trips, two quarantines. See how that’s starting to add up? That is a lot of time off work, and a lot of travel during these uncertain COVID times.

I call it interviewing when I meet a Dr at a fertility clinic, and I did that yesterday in Portland. Josh and I went to see this guy back in November 2019, back in the days when the two of us could go inside the office. His plan is similar to Barbados treatment plan (after all it’s just egg and sperm and a petri dish, how different could the plan be) and he is nice which matters to me. His price (including the genetic testing and FET) is the same as two trips to Barbados: $20,000 give or take a few thousand depending on how many embryos we get as there is a per embryo genetic testing fee and freezing fee. We have already started bolstering our savings account again, and my rad housesitting gig will go straight into that account.

It is inconceivable that we funded our last 4 trips mostly by the generosity of many kind humans. (Does that word mean what I think it means?) If you had told me a year ago that we would raise almost $25,000 for our 4 attempts I would have said NO WAY, that is not possible. Yet another of the many unknowable things in this universe is how generous and supportive our friends and family and community have been. The 1st time we interviewed Northwest Fertility we decided against having treatment there because of the price tag. I am terrified at the prospect of coming up with that kind of money by May, but I don’t see another way forward.

We are energetically in the conference room at the white board trying to come up with a plan to fundraise this giant sum of money. To be clear there is popcorn and cookies and blankets in this conference room because we are also energetically pretty exhausted. There are a few more candles left to sell, we will make a spring scent becsuse that would be fun. I’m sure the path forward will reveal itself, but until we know what that is we wanted to update you on where we’re at. Our faith in the power of love to create a family is strong, some other parts of our faith are shaken.

We are doing the best we can to navigate this strange path we have been asked to walk. I stretch my leg out to take a step forward and I worry there will be no ground to stand on; as I move in this direction the ground keeps surprising me by being solid underneath my foot. I think we can all agree that the uncertainty of these times will be etched in our memory and our grandkids will ask us about them, we are all putting one foot in front of the other trying to make sense of what’s coming next. We all have something to navigate, for me its infertility for you its something else. I often say to myself “Other People Feel This” and it helps to know we are all just doing the best we can. Rhyming French words with English ones is thinking outside the box and I think that kind of innovation is what the future needs. A theory to throw at the unknowable things, just to see if we can kinda maybe know them a little. I’m looking for the energy to try again.