A Husbands Perspective - Part 2

Hey all, sorry it's been a while since an update. T wrote a blog post a few days after the transfer and he decided he wanted me to share his prespective with you again.  I know you are probably all on pins and needles waiting to hear any news. When the time comes, we will share, as for now, we are just still trying to process all the information that was handed to us.

For now, A husband's perspective moment:


1 to Transfer, 9 Frozen

Hello again, it's the husband here, sorry to interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast but let me do some math first, sorry for the delay in starting this post it is the engineer in me... So we have myself, my wife, 9 frozen potential babies, and 1 potential baby to transfer as part of the IVF cycle. That adds up to a potential family of 12. Number of indoor volleyball players on a court on one team's side is 6, yes thats right the family of 12 could now potentially hold its own volleyball matches in our backyard... We could enter a team into a league as one family team, most leagues have a roster limit of 12. What would the team name be? My favorite team name of all time that I have used for two of my teams in the past, of course the team members didn't like the name, was none other then Train Wreck. Leave it to a guy to compare numbers of kids to a sport, but most people would compare how many kids they would potentailly have to fielding a baseball team, with these kind of numbers I could have two dream volleyball teams.

(our embryo that was transferred)

It is funny that I started with doing math, it is funny because I decided to talk about the fun part of this many kids, and I conviently side stepped the greater issue of money. How on earth would you provide for 10 children and 2 parents? A Child costs on average 799 U.S. Dollars per month, hope you liked my marketing skills to show that 799 looks so much less than 800. So some more math gives us a cost of 10 children at 7990 U.S. Dollars. Thats 95,880 U.S. Dollars a year, and that does not include college costs or costs for me and my wife. I guess having a volleyball team or two is ultimately unaffordable without a TV show... Don't worry I don't have a TV show coming out on TLC known as the Volleyballers...


So now back to reality, based on statistics not all of the frozen embryos will make it through the dethawing process, not all the embryos will be genetically viable past day 5 of development. So even if all 9 of the frozen embryos made it through the thawing process, not all of the embryos will make it through the first tri-mester. If the embryos are all above average, of which they are not, then only about 60% would become babies, that means of the frozen and the one live transfered embryo we would have a potential of a total of 6 children. If our embryos were only at the average and all of the frozen survive thawing only 49 percent will make it threw the first trimester. In our case that would mean 5 children. If we take into account the statistics that address above average thawing of 90 percent survive, so in our case we will assume this is the same as above. By taking the average numbers of 60 percent survival, this would reduce our above average number and at average numbers by one, so that would be 5 and 4 children respectively, and I rounded up in both cases.

 
So what do we do if the statistics are blown out of the water and we end up with a bunch of frozen embryos when we are done having children? Well I believe that life starts at conception, I also do NOT believe in abortion. IVF can not happen without God, Science puts the pieces together but God makes the action happen, ie cells spliting and fertization happen. We had 18 Mature eggs, but only 15 fertilized, why didn't God fertilize those other 3? Of the 15 that fertilized only 10 made it to day 5, why didn't those other 5 make it? Why weren't those genetically viable? Why couldn't God have made them viable? So what to do with the embryos that are still frozen? This is where I believe in helping others by donating those embryos to those couples that can not have children. How do I feel about having biological children on the earth without knowing them you ask? I am perfectly fine with that, for the mother that recieves our embryos with now have the opportunity to be connected to their child by carrying that child, it enables them to have children. In my mind it is their children that God is providing to them by using me and my wife. I will serve others before myself as Jesus did and how we know them by reading the history of them in the Bible. I do know this, if we end up have more then we need, the others that I will hope to donate I will be praying for them and their families daily. My Wife and I will take this process one step at a time and we will pray for guidance for many weeks and months before we decide to stop having more children and then we will pray for what we should do if we still have embryos that are frozen. What would you do in this scenario? Would love to read your responses in the comments. I will read them all and then I will respond to them all in a future blog post.