Hitch-hiking through a tour of infertility

Monday morning 8 am – I began taking the prerequisite Progynova (estradiol valerate, a prodrug of the natural human oestradiol).  The donor recipient cycle plan prescribed I take 3 x 2mg per day.

Monday morning 11.30 am – the headache began. These hormonal headaches are, I am sure, familiar to most IVFers. They don’t disable me and put me in hospital (like migraines have been known to) nor do they cause as much discomfort as say, my standard sinus headache. They are there, and act as a constant reminder that we are again trying to conceive.

Monday mid-afternoon Wobbles made the mistake of commenting “the medication couldn’t possibly be affecting you yet!” He won’t be doing that again.

The headache hadn’t lifted by our Wednesday morning appointment to see Dr Loverley.We were returning to ask all those last minute questions and possibly get some reassurance. Never before had we been so thorough. We had to get this one right.

Dr Loverley’s response to seeing us was one of surprise. Instantly reminding me how much the Australian fertility specialist’s fees for ‘cycle management’ is bit of a misnomer. That management is very remote and hands mostly off.

“What went wrong?” came the first of a rush of puzzled questions from our young doctor “did the donor change her mind?”

No, everything was fine we promised him. We had questions. Many many last minute questions;

Were the previous vague mentions of my fibroids likely to be an issue?

Should I follow my GP’s pressure to withdraw from anti depressants?

Could I continue my daily usage of a public swimming pool after embryo transfer?

Was genetic testing still necessary in a donor egg pregnancy?

Dr Loverley had well phrased answers to all of our questions. But one of them stopped me in my tracks. In response to our questions about fibroids, Dr Loverely started talking about surrogates.

Surrogates?!

He introduced the term into the infertility conversation with ease. I was frozen. We had come to terms with the need for donor eggs, but in one foul swoop we had moved into a whole new trying to conceive stratosphere.

Again – surrogates?

The information that there were fibroids had previously been casually shared by ultrasound technicians over our years of IVF cycles. They’d never been more of a vague and distance annoyance looming on my uterine horizon. Until now.

More and more I began to feel growing resentment. Before and during our first five IVF cycles we’d been constantly barraged with our alleged extreme need for donor eggs. Finally, we had arrived at that conclusion ourselves and now with complete ease the baby bar had just been raised without fair warning.

Perhaps Dr Loverley only meant it as a throw-away line. I cannot be sure. He spoke of sending patients overseas to find surrogates to carry their babies. I tried doing my fertility sums. Donor + surrogate + Wobbles = no place for me.

He gave us instructions to ask our ultrasound technician information about the location and size of my fibroids. It would only later occur to us that more ‘official’ instructions might have been more useful on that score.

Wobbles and I would later compare notes on the appointment. I saw it as negative. Wobbles saw it all in positive terms. Nevertheless Dr Loverely had seemed to notice my confused gaze and ended the appointment on a high note; “no, I think your chances are good!” It seemed that no amount of reassurance could quell my growing sense of foreboding.

I couldn’t think past his words.

Surrogate?

Had those infertility goal posts just moved without warning to an even less accessible locale?

As far as I understand, the Australian state where we reside surrogacy is against the law. In the case of commercial surrogacy it is an offence to give or receive any payment or reward under a surrogacy agreement. It is also illegal to arrange a surrogacy agreement or act as a surrogate mother. All surrogate agreements both altruistic and commercial are void. I believe the state of Queensland is moving to pass legislation to allow altruistic surrogacy, but still all I could see was the hurdles piling even higher before us.

Either way, this would mean travel – interstate or international. While Wobbles loves to journey to many places, I am the world’s worst traveller. The thought of combining the discomforts of travel with the agonies of infertility sound like my idea of Hell. Yet, I thought of my IVF pal Journey Girl and her willingness to travel to Thailand for an extended stay. It had been worth it. All that effort and expense got her and Journey Man their Journey Baby. The steely determination required for a move as gutsy as that leaves me breathless. The long long car or train journeys home after our own bung cycle results still fresh in my mind. The mind can put itself through whole new depths of recriminations and regrets in five or six hours of travel confinement. I didn’t want to begin to contemplate a broken-hearted flight back from IVF failure.

Asking anyone to loan us their womb seemed a step too far. Finding someone able, let alone willing to book their body out for a 40 week commitment is one thing. Having the courage and conviction of self to ask them is an entirely different matter. Suddenly, it seemed as though this gorgeous big brown land was conspiring against our efforts to have a baby.

That night I hit the pages of Dr Google big time. A crash course in surrogacy laws of the known universe and I was on my way. Somehow my searches kept coming back to surrogacy in India. So there were parts of this world where altruism wasn’t part of the donor or surrogate baby equation. For many reasons I am far more comfortable with this. The idea of a friend or relative stepping in fills me with thoughts of a life of endless gratitude and debts that can never be repaid. I am just not the kind of gal who attracts friends and relatives like that.

It seems that surrogate mothers in India are like baby guns for hire. They are there, if you have the time, funds and need. Why making sure everyone is covered there is even surrogacy for single men in India.

My need to always have a back-up plan – something to do with a long history of the main plan always being destined to failure – led me to pondering the idea of surrogacy in some detail. The financial toll of IVF has already proven to be significant. I asked Wobbles how much more we could afford to invest in our baby project. In his own Wobbles’ exuberance he managed to put a whole different spin on things. “Our baby” he countered “is priceless.” As usual the costs of all of this would need to be sorted out later.

Although it had begun to feel otherwise, we still had some choices in becoming parents. Those choices started to offer more than just the Giving Up Option. Would we need to have our own India Surrogacy Story? Only time would tell.