The Beck Boys
I wanted to start this off with a humble apology. It has been sometime since I last posted and there is no excuse for that other than LIFE.
We have all been there. We think oh, yes this is going to be easy. A quick blog entry a week. I’ve got this. We’ll, life happens and I don’t have this. This was way more time consuming that I thought but I still want to write for yall when I do have the chance. So, expect sporadic posts, long posts, and post with a lot of grammar issues but I am most likely typing this from my phone.
So what have we been up to….. Well, a lot. Let’s start where we left off. We met with several agencies in Cancun, Mexico and finally decided on New Life. With all of our medical test out of the way, the first payments made, and our flights booked we are headed to Cancun. Can I just say this was very stressful for me. I just wired a large sum of money to a company I have only met via video calls and we are headed to a country where I am not fluent in their native language. Needless to say Brandon is the chill one. We arrive in Cancun the middle of April 2021 and immediately head to the clinic and the office. I cannot express enough about how welcoming our Medical Coordinator was and still is. My stress level drops exponentially the minutes we arrive at their office and get a quick tour of the office and the clinic. My sister in law has her first appointment with the doctor and starts her on the hormone treatments. After lunch we are headed off to our Airbnb. Another stress inducer for me. Is it going to be nice? Is it going to be comfortable? Is it going to be safe? We arrive and yet again I let my nerves get the better of me. The apartment is perfect. I will say we did have a few issues while at this current Airbnb but they were not the hosts fault. Overall a very amazing apartment. A little far from the clinic and we had daily appointments so we did have to get a rental car but we had originally planned for that so we could go to Tulum for a day hike. In an effort to keep this catch up post not too long I am going to fast forward a little. We are on egg retrieval day. We end up 4 mature eggs, 3 of the 4 took fertilization, 2 of the 3 grew to embryos. This was a huge sucker punch in the gut for us. We had originally expected to have way more viable embryos than just 2. We press on with sending those for PGS testing. This test takes about 30 days to come back. We are back home in Texas and not so patiently waiting the results. Yet another sucker punch. One of the embryos showed signs of a genetic disorder that is very common with miscarriages thus our embryogolist will not transfer this one. The other embryo is female with a small placenta. The doctor said this one is viable but we would need to use embryo glue when the transfer took place. This was very disappointing for us. We needed time to think and reflect.
Another fast forward to August and we have decided to have another egg retrieval but as you guys remember neither of our families know what we are doing so we have to come up with a plan to be away for another 2 weeks without them knowing. We decided that Brandon and his sister would fly down for the first part of the stimulation and I would just fly down for the last few day. I could leave my semen sample and then we could all fly home. The doctor decided to switch thing up on us a little and do what is called a dual stimulation. This means that he would start our egg donor on the hormone treatment and have one egg retrieval and then immediately start on an additional stimulation to allow the eggs that were not ready time to grow and develop. Well this didn’t work. We had the first egg retrieval on a Thursday and I’m planning to fly home by myself on Sunday and they would stay an additional 3 or 4 days. I wake up Monday morning back in Texas and get a call from Brandon at 9:05 AM to move their flights because none of the eggs did anything from Friday to Monday so the doctor was scrapping the dual stimulation plan. We had 2 viable embryos from this retrieval and we asked of we could hold them and decide if we wanted to try again before sending those off for the PGS testing. One quick note about the PGS testing. It costs $5800 for 1 to 8 embryos you have tested. The clinic agreed to hold them and let’s see how Brandon’s sister did after a month of recovery.
We decided to try again on her next cycle if everything looks good on the ultrasound. One big problem, we can’t really calculate her cycle now because it is off from the last retrieval. So we have to have everything ready to go the minute she started and we pulled it off with a whirlwind one day trip to Cancun from Texas. That’s 4 cities, 4 airports, and 2 countries in just 17 hours. Was it worth it, absolutely yes it was. We split the stimulation into two parts and spent most of the time here in the states and only flew back to Cancun for the trigger shot and the egg retrieval. This made her more comfortable because she was able to be home longer vs spending that time bored in an Airbnb. With this egg retrieval we ended up with 2 more embryos to send off. This gives us a total of 4 that were sent off the beginning of October for the PGS testing.
We are currently awaiting the results. I am going to try to get better about give yall an update as we move through this process.
Fingers crossed we get very good news from the clinic in the next couple of days.
