The day our baby-making story began in earnest was 12 May, 2016 - over a year earlier than we'd originally planned.
As I mentioned in a previous post, shortly after our wedding in March 2016 a friend messaged us with a piece of surprising and somewhat unwelcome news - that the wait-list to use a public sperm donor was 18 months long. We, perhaps naively, or perhaps just because how the hell we were we supposed to know, had not anticipated a waiting list. We had anticipated agonising over which traits to prioritise in a donor, and wondered how we would know whether or not they were curious and kind. We had anticipated that the only hold up would be the time it took us to pore over a catalogue filled with blood test results and medical histories and try to use these words and numbers to decide on a stranger to help us make a family.
It is safe to say that so far, this is the most drastically wrong we have been about what this baby-making journey would look like for us.
After receiving the message that alerted us to the fact that we were wildly off the mark, we took a look at our timeline. We were anticipating trying to get pregnant around the end of 2017-start of 2018, so we still had time to do the plan almost perfectly if we just got ourselves on the wait-list. Bullet dodged! By this stage, we had figured out that the most sensible option would be for Linda to go first, so she went to the GP for preliminary bloods and we were referred to Fertility Associates, and we soon got a letter inviting us to an appointment on May 12th.
The appointment itself was very clinical and straightforward. We met the doctor who would be in charge of our baby-making process, introduced ourselves, and explained the plan. He told us that the wait time for a clinic donor was actually closer to two years in Auckland, but that the rest of the plan sounded fine. His only concern was something called AMH - anti-mullerian hormone. People who are born with ovaries are born with their entire egg supply, and those eggs degrade in number and quality over time. Anti-mullerian hormone is a measure of how many quality eggs you have left at any given time. (The creepiest thing is that all you need is just a blood test. YOUR BLOOD KNOWS HOW MANY EGGS THERE ARE IN YOUR OVARIES AT ALL TIMES. That does not seem like a super useful thing for blood to need to know when there are a billion things it does not seem to be able to know like am I making enough serotonin or do I maybe need some pills? Is there cancer somewhere in my body? Am I just boring old forgetful or am I developing dementia? I've gone off track.)
Anyway. The doctor said that because of my endometriosis, two surgeries worth of scarring, and the fact that my ovaries were stuck to my abdomen wall, it was possible that my egg reserve had been affected and I may need to go first before I lost even more in the years between our first and second pregnancies. We registered on the donor sperm list and he sent us both away to get blood tests that included our AMH levels, not expecting to see us again until over a year later when we came back to prepare for when we made it to the top of the list.
The wait for the results turned hours into days. A tiny part of me was hoping, selfishly, that my AMH would be low enough for us to decide that I could go first after all. As it turned out, the one time I wouldn't have minded my body being a little defective, my AMH result was completely normal. Linda's, though... Linda's wasn't.
At the bottom of her letter, beneath all of the numbers and ranges and explanations of coloured zones, was a paragraph about what her results actually meant. It was not subtle. In fact, it contained this sentence:
"If you are in a stable relationship and would be happy to start a family, we recommend trying for a pregnancy as soon as possible."
We called Fertility Associates and booked an appointment for the following week.
As I mentioned in a previous post, shortly after our wedding in March 2016 a friend messaged us with a piece of surprising and somewhat unwelcome news - that the wait-list to use a public sperm donor was 18 months long. We, perhaps naively, or perhaps just because how the hell we were we supposed to know, had not anticipated a waiting list. We had anticipated agonising over which traits to prioritise in a donor, and wondered how we would know whether or not they were curious and kind. We had anticipated that the only hold up would be the time it took us to pore over a catalogue filled with blood test results and medical histories and try to use these words and numbers to decide on a stranger to help us make a family.
It is safe to say that so far, this is the most drastically wrong we have been about what this baby-making journey would look like for us.
After receiving the message that alerted us to the fact that we were wildly off the mark, we took a look at our timeline. We were anticipating trying to get pregnant around the end of 2017-start of 2018, so we still had time to do the plan almost perfectly if we just got ourselves on the wait-list. Bullet dodged! By this stage, we had figured out that the most sensible option would be for Linda to go first, so she went to the GP for preliminary bloods and we were referred to Fertility Associates, and we soon got a letter inviting us to an appointment on May 12th.
The appointment itself was very clinical and straightforward. We met the doctor who would be in charge of our baby-making process, introduced ourselves, and explained the plan. He told us that the wait time for a clinic donor was actually closer to two years in Auckland, but that the rest of the plan sounded fine. His only concern was something called AMH - anti-mullerian hormone. People who are born with ovaries are born with their entire egg supply, and those eggs degrade in number and quality over time. Anti-mullerian hormone is a measure of how many quality eggs you have left at any given time. (The creepiest thing is that all you need is just a blood test. YOUR BLOOD KNOWS HOW MANY EGGS THERE ARE IN YOUR OVARIES AT ALL TIMES. That does not seem like a super useful thing for blood to need to know when there are a billion things it does not seem to be able to know like am I making enough serotonin or do I maybe need some pills? Is there cancer somewhere in my body? Am I just boring old forgetful or am I developing dementia? I've gone off track.)
Anyway. The doctor said that because of my endometriosis, two surgeries worth of scarring, and the fact that my ovaries were stuck to my abdomen wall, it was possible that my egg reserve had been affected and I may need to go first before I lost even more in the years between our first and second pregnancies. We registered on the donor sperm list and he sent us both away to get blood tests that included our AMH levels, not expecting to see us again until over a year later when we came back to prepare for when we made it to the top of the list.
The wait for the results turned hours into days. A tiny part of me was hoping, selfishly, that my AMH would be low enough for us to decide that I could go first after all. As it turned out, the one time I wouldn't have minded my body being a little defective, my AMH result was completely normal. Linda's, though... Linda's wasn't.
At the bottom of her letter, beneath all of the numbers and ranges and explanations of coloured zones, was a paragraph about what her results actually meant. It was not subtle. In fact, it contained this sentence:
"If you are in a stable relationship and would be happy to start a family, we recommend trying for a pregnancy as soon as possible."
We called Fertility Associates and booked an appointment for the following week.
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