Dear Readers,

I am so very sorry I need to update and I will back date the entries so everyone can catch up very soon. The first 14 weeks of our pregnancy were fantastic and normal. I had morning sickness and fatigue that kept me away from you, my blog friends. I was working full time and caring for Love at home when I got off, we were in BLISS. Happy and unaware of the call I would get at work on my 14th week of pregnancy. These past 2 weeks have been hell going back and forth with Dr offices and the cryobank, and never hearing from our RE office about the issue at hand. This past Friday we received answers to a very big question and Saturday we went in for a "fun gender scan" that turned horribly wrong. Our baby had passed away between my doctor appointment Thursday and our early morning appointment on Saturday for our "fun" ultrasound. We found no heart beat Saturday morning and I began the drive 1 hour and 15 minutes to our town with my dear hubby, Love since he can not drive post stroke. I delivered our sweet little boy, Turtle at 3:16am Sunday morning, silently and at peace. We will share his name openly once all is finished. I promise full disclosure to you when I am told it is okay to blog openly about this situation. To say we have broken hearts would be an understatement. However I just can't tell this amazing little baby's story yet, we have to make sure some wrongs are righted and I do not want to jeopardize that. Love, Birdie PS I will resume blogging after his funeral arrangements are made and We have had some time to process this loss.

CD8 and an Update!

Dr Awesome decided because of my cycle last month that he would like this cycle to be medicated for our dIUI. I started my Femara (Letrozole) on Friday, my CD3 through yesterday on CD7. Overall I haven't had any real side effects but then again I've had a sinus thing going on with some low grade fever and attributed my headaches and hot flashes to that... Monday is CD 13 and we are scheduled for an ultrasound first thing in the morning with a follow up insem and trigger if all goes well. We are doing insems 2 days in a row. I feel at peace with this TTC journey. We have been through so much over the past 3 years from failed surrogacy attempts, my hubby's stroke and following recovery, and dropping toxic family members. Love and I have rebuilt our life and went from being in a dual income household, to nothing until Love was recovered. He had to medically retire as a physician because in his chosen profession he needed both hands functioning. He finally knows what he wants to go back to school for and is working toward that, and I am happy to say that I just received a job offer. WAHOO! We are very happy that we have made hard but necessary changes in our life and are ready for baby now in God's time. I have a sense of peace not only over our TTC but in life in general. I feel so blessed to have my husband home, healthy, and we are both ready to finally have a baby together! It has been 23 months since Love's stroke and I have been off work since that night. I have looked for jobs, and between our move across country and back I just hadn't found anything. I hadn't found anything until this week that is. You may remember last month when I interviewed for a job and had a horrific interview experience.. if not read all about that interview from hell . Well this past Monday I had another interview for my former job that I worked until Love's stroke. I had both places call within a 24 hour period and offer me a job! SO I am no longer unemployed. In fact I have 2 jobs to choose from! WAHOO!!!! I will receive insurance benefits as of April 1st. Everything is falling into place and I couldn't be happier... ESPECIALLY if I get knocked up next Monday!

ICLW: Getting to know you...

Hello fellow ICLWers Welcome to my bloggy home! I hope you are all having a fabulous week so far. I figured I should give you the skinny on my story here at Birdie's Family Journey. Love and I went on our first date in November of 2008, engaged in April of 2009, and married in August of 2009... yes that was a whirlwind but I have to tell you not a day goes by that I don't thank God for my husband.  Plus we wanted to add to our family ASAP and we aren't spring chickens! I have 2 grown children from my first marriage. Froggy almost20 and Bug who just turned 18. If you want a breakdown of why I can't carry my DH's baby go here. We started our journey to baby via surrogacy during that fall, and were matched to a wonderful surrogate, who had to back out due to a home electrical fire right before our appointment for psych evals, and cycling. We were so very sad but understood that she needed to focus on her home and family. We went through a few potential matches including a family member match. We were all set to to on our journey and prepping for a June cycle when my dear hubby had a stroke due to unregulated hypertension April 30, 2010. Life changed in an instant, One month before his 37th birthday my hubby was suddenly in a fight for his life. At that instant we went from a dual income family to a no income family, and luckily we had money saved, and the ability to fall back and regroup. I had changed jobs right after we married and didn't have FMLA time allowed so not only did Love's private practice end my job did as well, while my husband was in surgical ICU and in a coma I was told by my workplace.

I spent the next year being Love's personal cheerleader and after almost 4 months in the hospital he was able to come home to a newly renovated place (had to be done for him to come home)... and we continued with on average 9-11 appointments each week for the first few months then it backed down to around 6 appointments each week and tapered off until last July when he stopped all outside therapies. He no longer practices and is medically retired, his Bp is now under control and he is feeling like its time to restart our journey in a new way. We know we still want to pursue surrogacy in the future because we have 3 frozen embryos that are great quality. We do however want to have more than 1 child so they have a sibling.  We have an appointment on February 15th to start a dIUI cycle. I look forward to sharing our journey with you all and please leave a comment, follow me, and I will for sure be following you ladies and gents back!

The Infertile Fertile: my story about me

I have received so many emails, and open questions asking about my story. People in my everyday life whether it's at church, work or just friends I have met after my move here to asking about our potential surrogacy or use of donor sperm (since Love is a positive blood type with me carrying) plans since they know I have had children. I decided that maybe I should open up and explain exactly what makes me fall into the infertile community. Likely there aren't many out there who have heard about my specific ailment, so fasten your seat belt, put your thinking caps on and take notes, because here comes the story of How Birdie Is Broken! in technical terms:

My story is different, I am not infertile, yet I walk the same path to expanding my family as many Infertile couples do. Why? I have Rh disease. Rh is basically what makes your blood type negative or positive but there is more. Rh factor deals with antigen d in the bloodstream. This is where most people say "Oh yeah my (insert sister, aunt, mom, cousin, friend here) had that and they just got a shot of RhoGAM, can't you just do that?" The problem is once you have antibodies built up to specific things they never go away. In fact in this case with each pregnancy they start building once again from the vary place they ended with the last pregnancy. There are 2 other antigens also present in the blood stream to express specific blood types, c and e.  My blood type is O- I have a negative recessive blood type. From each of my parents I received cde. Lower case letters are used to show a non- dominant or recessive trait. Each person has 2 sets of these 3 specific antigens. When a woman becomes sensitized to another blood type, either through blood passing back and forth between mother and child, or transfusion, or some other unknown way blood would enter into her bloodstream she builds antibodies against the offending antigen expressed in the blood. This is purely out of protection, if our bodies didn't build antibodies against these things it could not just be harmful , but could cause death. Antibodies are the way our body fights infections, and disease.

In my specific situation I became sensitized to D and C antigens. I never received baseline testing or (Antibody titer) since this was my first pregnancy to see where my levels were. One day Dr W came in and said "oh we missed giving you the RhoGAM shot and need to do that today." When my son Froggy was born we had no clue there was anything wrong. I had a normal pregnancy, but within a couple weeks of my RhoGAM shot (given to me late at like 33 weeks instead of 28 weeks) I went into labor and the doctor had to stop it. The hospital kept me overnight and then sent me home. The next week I was in and out of the hospital and then finally the last time they wanted to keep me in for 23 hour observation after stopping labor again, I said no I want to go home. I will go see the doctor in the morning if that is okay with him. I was exhausted, being poked and prodded all night over and over, I just wanted my bed, at my home. The next morning I went to the doctor, I was sitting in the office and noticed that I started having timeable contractions. I calmly went to the front desk and told them I was contracting and they brought me in back quickly. I was dialated 2 stretchable to a 3 and 70% effaced. The doctor sent me over to the hospital and told them to stop my labor with an IV drug terbutaline.  This gave me time to get my husband home and rested since he was on midnights and had gone back and forth telling work each time I was in labor that indeed that day was baby day. He didn't want to call in to his boss with another false alarm. At this point I felt like the boy who cried wolf. :) The next morning when Dr W made his rounds he went to check me and my bag of waters broke. He calmly said well you are staying, and will have the baby sometime tonight. That was 6 hours and 7 minutes before my first child was born. SO not only do I get pregnant easy and have a great uterus I have babies quickly... (Although my sister holds the record in our family for fastest 1st baby with 3 hours.) When Froggy came out he was very yellow, the nurses evaluating him never slipped him into my arms, they wrapped him quickly and said "say hi to mommy and daddy" as they whisked him out of the delivery room in into the nursery where he could be better evaluated. Froggy had a very severe case of jaundice caused by my Rh sensitivity. I wasn't allowed to see Froggy for about 7 hours.



So here is where it gets interesting I guess... What do all those antibodies do when passed from the Rh negative mother to the positive blood typed child?  Well my body became aware that a foreign blood type that was potentially harmful to my health was inside me. In normal response my bloodstream sent antibodies built against the "intruder" across the placenta to attach to the red blood cell to "buffer" it and make it safe for me. The baby's white blood cells then acted on that when they recognized something is wrong with that red blood cell. White blood cells fight against infections in our body. SO in this case the white blood cells killed the red blood cells with antibodies attached to them. This is a vicious cycle. In my latter pregnancies when we knew that this was happening they would do amniocentesis to check the level and color of the fluid and then when it was time the doctors would bring me in for Percutaneous Umbilical Blood Sampling (PUBS) with a follow up transfusion. In effect they would transfuse the baby through me. They waited as late as possible to start this process because once you do this process it pollutes the amnionic fluic and you can't go back to the less invasive testing. Each pregnancy gets worse because the anitbodies do not go away they build from where they left off last time. the higher the antibody count the more high risk and potentially fatal to the unborn child. Froggy received 2 exchange transfusions at the hospital before coming home, then another at 11 days old. Babies do not break down iron to make red blood cells while in-utero so as the white blood cells killed the red blood cells there were no new red blood cells being made. We had to wait for Froggy to make them on his own. It was very scary and quite touch and go. With Bug's pregnancy I was moved immediately to Loyola University and the MFM group there watched over our progress. I was text book, followed all directions, residents learned to do amnios on me. Calm as a cucumber. The pregnancy was documented and used during one of the doctors talks at a continuing ed seminar he gave. Bug was born 6 weeks early and the MFM Group said they thought with how well this pregnancy went I could go through one more. Bug had 4 PUBS with followup transfusions, and 2 transfusions after birth. This ended  my successful pregnancies. I became pregnant with my son Little Bean, who was born at just 26 weeks gestation, he lived just 55 minutes. He was in distress shortly after the first PUBS and transfusion. I had to have an emergency c-section. That's not the end of my story but it definitely shows how each pregnancy gets worse until the babies are not safe and there is nothing the specialists can do to help once antibodies grow to huge proportions.

I went on to have many more losses but these first three pregnancies show clearly what happens in Rh sensitization cases. Each one gets worse, until the baby can not possibly reach a viable stage in the pregnancy.

I walk the road of an infertile, knowing that I don't truly fit into either category "Fertile" or "Infertile". What I know is the intense desire to have children, and not be able to. What I've learned is that when infertiles go month after month experiencing periods hating that their bodies are telling them they can't have the one thing they desire most. A baby.  They mourn not for the lost child as I have with Little Bean, but the hopes and dreams for that little boy or girl that seems so out of reach. She was going to be the first woman president, he was going to be a wonderful business man or the researcher that found the cure to cancer. We all mourn the hopes, and dreams we had for that child or children and that is our common bond. I don't share the struggle to conceive but I do share the struggle to mother and bring life into existence.

When my son Little Bean died, I became angry at God. I felt cold and dead inside. I remember driving to the cemetery and weeping as I lay across his grave. I thought my arms would forever feel empty.Years later I started going back to church, and reclaimed my relationship with Heavenly Father. Now I am remarried, to a wonderful man. He is here everyday, telling, showing and guiding me toward fulfilling our dream of a family together. Hand in hand, with our eyes fixed on Him we walk in faith. Do I feel sad still about past choices, and mistakes? Yes. Do I beat myself up about them? Not anymore. I know that I could have made different choices, better ones perhaps, but maybe making those choices, going through that growth has made me who I am today. I love the me I am today, and I can not wait to tell my little one the story of how we brought them to be, against the odds with faith in Heavenly Father's greater plan.