Someone Call Me

Well, it's Monday and there's been no news on that profiling. I have been ridiculously consumed by it - checking my phone umpteen times a day this weekend. She should have received our adoption profile on Friday, and she was due any day, but even if she hasn't given birth yet I just have the feeling she's already picked someone else. And it makes me so, so sad.

I don't know why this one is hitting me so badly. I think because of the half caucasian/half hispanic angle, or the name angle, or the no drugs/alcohol angle or even the "want to keep in touch but not too much touch angle." And the fact that it's a girl. I may have a soft-spot in my heart for girls (although I want ANY baby no matter what!). It just seemed so perfect for us.

The other opportunities I was excited about but definitely not this excited. And there's really no difference in this one vs. the other ones. But this weekend we found out that my SIL is pregnant again after her December miscarriage (she waited slightly longer this time to tell us - 8 weeks) and it just brings back the fact that everyone has kids now/is pregnant and we're just sitting here, alone.

Heh, I even hoped my phone would ring right about 9am this morning, the adoption agency, perhaps not technically "working" over the weekend, calling first thing. So far, it has not happened :(

Our appts. in Boston went well. It was a very long day though. We were up at 5am to make it to Boston by 9:30am and even though we left early we still barely made it on time thanks to rush hour traffic. We started in pre-op anesthesia where I signed the consents for anesthesia for the egg retrieval I'm not even going to have in the next month. I did get to see the Boston doctor who's doing my surrogacy cycle, and gave her the embryo information for my last cycle which she didn't have yet. She told me she had already decided upon a protocol for me based on what I had told her previously but she was going to review the latest information I handed her just to make sure. Sounds like a good plan to me.

After that, we went to the heart center to discuss the genetics of my heart. I had to go over the most inane questions with the fellows and residents. "When did you learn you had a heart condition?" Um, I was born with it. "So you learned about it immediately?" Well, *I* had no idea at approximately 1 day old, duh.

They did a physical exam and don't think that my heart condition is genetic (thereby putting myself into an even smaller anomaly percentage, yay :/) but took blood work anyway just to confirm. If there's no genetic component we don't need to do PGS for any specific heart defect.

After a quick lunch at Au Bon Pain (the only reason to ever go to a hospital in my opinion, is for their oatmeal raisin cookies - which got me through my last heart surgery :), we headed over the to the Dana Farber Cancer Clinic.

This was such a sad place. I've been in hospitals all my life, but with the exception of when I was a child, I don't remember seeing so many visibly sick people in the waiting rooms. I have an image in my mind from when I was young walking down a hallway in a hospital and walking by the thinnest, bluest girl who clearly had a heart condition but was still upright and ever since then I've wondered what happened to her. Is she still alive? Is she long dead? Did she make it to high school?

But here in the Dana Farber clinic there were so many people in wheelchairs, clearly debilitated. Still, cancer must be where the money is because the clinic was beautiful. And they gave away snacks. I've donated money before to the Jimmy Fund and I kind of was annoyed it was so nice. How much donated money goes to making things look pretty when it can be spent on medicine or research?

We met with some genetic counselors there and went over the cancer history in our families. Apparently L is more at risk because of his family's cancer history than mine, but there's still the chance we could both be carrying the BRCA 1 gene. And something new we learned: If we were both to pass on the BRCA 1 gene to a child of ours, it would never survive. Now, there's only a 25% chance with any given pregnancy that we would and I have had 4 pregnancies, so you would think it not likely. And it probably isn't. But since we're totally unexplained I guess it's not out of the realm of possibilities. So we had bloodwork taken for that too. We're not sure our insurance covers the test though so they will check first before running it. If not it's $3300 out of pocket for each of us - $6600 total. Yea, we can't afford that on top of surrogacy.

We headed back home after that and got stuck in so much traffic that it took us more than 5 hours to get home. (it should take us between 2.5-3 hrs normally). It was such a long day.

So now, there's nothing else to do but wait. The last of the prescreening appointments for surrogacy are next week. I ended my BCP pack on Friday and was told to stop taking it and wait for AF to come. Not sure if I will go back on it again or they have some other plan but will need to figure that part out soon.