Impatiently Waiting for our Miracle(s)

We don’t have anything earth-shattering to report, but we have had a lot of doctor’s appointments over the last two months, and I have a lot of people ask how Reid is doing… so I thought an update may be good. Quick recap: Reid was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis (UC) and Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC) 4 years ago this May. His PSC has progressed significantly over the last two years, and after two hospital stays in March and April of 2017, it was highly recommended that we start the liver transplant process. He was added to the transplant list in Houston on June 8 th , and the Indianapolis list at the beginning of August. We’ve applied for exception points (usually necessary for PSC patients – the disease makes the bile ducts of the liver very blocked, but the liver itself is not as bad. So PSC patients tend to have a lower MELD score) 3 times and have been denied. As I mentioned, we’ve had a lot of doctor’s appointments lately. But that’s becoming a new normal. To

I shared months ago about the lessons that I’ve learned over the course of our struggles. If you missed that, you can read here . But over the last week I had a very harsh reminder of the most valuable lesson I’ve learned – I can’t do this alone. If you’ve been following along, you know that we learned just after Christmas that our 2 nd round of IVF failed. Around that time, I also learned of a couple of people with PSC, the liver disease that Reid has, being diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was so ridden with anxiety and sadness. But I pretended to be okay. I didn’t talk much about any of it, but when others asked how I was doing I would just say “I’m okay, I mean what other choice do I have?” But that’s the thing, we do have another choice. Sometimes you have to let yourself breakdown and feel those feelings. But I didn’t… I just silently sat with a pit in my stomach for days, and didn’t talk about it. Maybe I thought it would go away? I honestly don’t think I was even doing i

21 days of androgen (testosterone) gel, 21 days of birth control, 21 days of estrace (estrogen), 47 injections over 10 days. 10,800 IU of Menopur, 10,800 IU of Gonal-f, 380 units of Lupron, 2 mL of Omnitrope, and 1 mL of Ovidrel. One egg retrieval, 7 eggs – all of which fertilized, 2 embryos became blasts, and zero were normal. IVF Round 2 was another big fat fail. We went into it with so much hope, as our doctor changed our protocol to an aggressive one. But in the end, we had the exact same result as last time. We’re disappointed, and feel pretty defeated. We have now had 6 abnormal embryos (2 through pregnancy losses, 4 through IVF) and each one has been a different chromosomal abnormality. Our first pregnancy loss was ectopic, so we have no way of knowing whether that was a normal embryo, our second was a male triploidy (it had 3 of each chromosome), the third was a male trisomy 11. With the IVF embryos, they’ve been: male trisomy 4, female monosomy 13, and the last