Yes, our Christmas trip to Rotunda has been successful. Our baby is reaching 16 weeks and all tests indicate a healthy pregnancy in our surrogate mother! We didn't want to write anything earlier for fear of jinxing this good luck after many, many years of trying to have a baby.
What we've learned over the past several months:
1) First, there are a number of "screening" and "diagnostic" tests done during a pregnancy. Screening tests don't prove anything, they are just "indicators". Diagnostic tests prove whether a problem exists or not. If you are over 40, the odds of downs syndrome exceed 1% and go up pretty quickly with age. The screening tests all use age (the egg donors) as one of several factors to determine if the pregnancy is high risk. But, high risk is defined as 1 in 250. So, age, by itself, moves a pregnancy into high risk. So, when you get your screening results back and they say your pregnancy is "high risk", read the fine print. Ours said that the risk was 1 in 100, which is actually better than the 1 in 50 rate you get based on our age. So, although the screening test said the pregnancy was high risk, the risk was getting lower when additional factors beyond age were added. Although high risk, the odds were moving in our favor. The good news is that the amniocentesis test, a diagnostic test done later in the pregnancy, just came back okay.
2) They won't tell us the sex of the baby until it is born. Because of problems with infanticide in India, doctors are legally prohibited from divulging the baby's sex until it is born. This is true for all births, including surrogate births. So, we're going old school and won't know the sex of the baby until it is born.
3) It does seem that it's possible to breast feed the baby even if you didn't carry it. We're checking into and learning more about "induced lactation"...
If everything continues well, we'll be off to India in September. Now to research the passport and travel issues, and dig deeper into the baby books.
We've also been in touch with two of the couples that we've met on our trips. One is also pregnant, and the other is not pregnant after two tries.
Congradulations, you have been through a lot but success is yours - for someone to go to through the emotional rollercoaster that you have been through you deserve all the happiness comming to you and I know your child will bring you unimaginable happiness. we have started the process but unfortunately recieved the news that our surrogate was not pregnant and after a few tears we have decided to try another attempt
ReplyDelete