A Bit Of Perspective

I just read a news story about the NRA filing a suit against the NOPD claiming they didn't make a "good faith effort" to find the owners of guns confiscated after Katrina. The NOPD managed to return about 100 out of 1000 guns. The NRA's hired private investigators were able to find 75 of the 300 owners they identified for their suit. "Finding these folks has been a nightmare," they lawyer is quoted as saying. I say the difficulty the NRA is having in finding these people just leads me to believe that the NOPD did in fact make a decent "good faith effort." Here's the story.

A Story Of A Squishy Gift

I got some nice things for Christmas this year. What I'll likely enjoy most are the DVD sets of Superbad (from my wife,) the complete Blackadder series (from my in-laws,) and the second season of HBO's Rome (from my parents, who apparently didn't notice the first season was still on my wishlist. Oh well. My birthday's not far off.) The most memorable, though, was something much more ephemeral, but it's not memorable for the nature of the gift itself, but rather on what happened to it.

My parents sent us a box of gifts for us, my in-laws, and our niece & nephews on my wife's side. We opened the box yesterday and among the individually wrapped gifts inside were a couple small round-ended gifts for me. They felt soft and I squeezed them a bit, guessing they were socks or some such thing.

This morning my wife and I opened our gifts from each other and from my parents. I squeezed the soft ones again, still speculating they were socks. I opened the first one and found that whatever it was was wrapped in bubble wrap. That was a good thing because it turned out to be a chocolate Hubig's pie. Oops. The other was the same thing. I opened and ate the softer-feeling of the two and it turned out fine, if cracked in one or two places. I think being surrounded by plastic kept the crust a bit moister than it would have been, and therefore a bit less prone to crumbling. That was fortunate. I can only imagine their condition had I squeezed them like I did if they were wrapped unprotected.

Maybe I'll post more later. For now I need to work on some Secret Headquarters business to prepare for tomorrow.

Happy Holidays!

Another Outlet For My Genius

Okay, maybe that's overstating things a bit, but we all do have our moments of genius and near-genius, don't we? Well, I'm hoping one or two of mine will occur through the lens of a camera because I've signed onto another print-on-demand site. This time it's Imagekind.com, which is focused on high-quality art and photo prints with a large assortment of frame and mat choices. If you have image files big enough, you can get prints up to 60"x45". The size selections for each image are automatically limited by the resolution of the image.

It's pretty easy. You sign up, pick an account type (they range from free with a 1-gallery/200M/24 image limit, to $11.99/month or $94.99/year unlimited Platinum plan,) create & name your gallery(s), and upload photos to them or import from Flickr. After that you can set names & descriptions and tags (if you want your images to be found in the on-site search,) and set your markup if you want more or less than the default 10%. And of course you should set up your profile and payment information so you can get the checks they should eventually be sending out.

It's fun! You can find my stuff, currently a dozen photos, here.

For The Record

A few of you may have already heard. Our second IVF cycle failed. This time we didn't even see a chemical pregnancy, though we may have just been lucky to catch it the first cycle.

We're regrouping now. We still have two embryos frozen so we can try again at a lower cost than a full cycle, though there is a chance neither will survive being thawed. My inclination at this point is to let my wife's younger sister try carrying them, or at the very least have a more thorough examination of my wife, perhaps a scope of her uterus, to determine if there are any factors preventing implantation. If there are, and it's just something correctable, we can do something about it before we try again. If there's something that's not fixable, we'd pretty much be left with my sister in law as a carrier.

If that fails, we might consider IUI with donor sperm. I'm thinking since I do have some fair-enough sperm, though admittedly not much, I'd like to see if we could do IUIs with a mix of my sperm and that of a near-lookalike donor. At least then any child to come of it could be genetically mine.

For now, we're taking a little time off to get some distance from the disappointment so we can make good rational decisions to maximize our chances for a baby. It's not that difficult to take our minds off it at the moment, actually, since we both have bad colds. I'll be getting back to blogging about other things as well.

Post-Transfer IVF Update

We transferred four embryos Wednesday, all graded 3+. (Yes, that's actually them in the picture.) We talked to the embryologist afterward and he told us he tends to be a little tougher in his grading than the other embryologist who graded the three we transferred last time, and she probably would have given three of this batch's embryos a 4-. Last time we had a 4-, a 3+, and a 3, so we have more and somewhat better embryos transferred this time around. As it turns out, a tenth fertilized embryo was spotted, though it was less developed than the others. A late fertilization apparently.

It was kind of rough on my wife. She was rather bloated from all the fluid built up before and after the egg retrieval, and the ultrasound nurse had a very firm hand. She feels now like she may have a bit of bruising from it. It was the good nurse at the clinic this time (she was off the day of the transfer last time) so they were able to use the ultrasound to guide the transfer and verify the placement. Last time they had to resort to dead reckoning based on the measurement taken in the mock transfer.

After a rest in the bed and an hour-long talk with the embryologist that my wife said reminded her of being in college (she was a biology major) we headed home. The next day, after doing one or two essential things at Secret Headquarters to get the rest of us started, she headed home to the recliner for the day.

I called the clinic Friday to check on the progress of the other embryos. They said one was in a pre-blastocyst stage and could be ready to freeze Saturday. The others were still in the multi-cellular stage and had a bit to go before being ready. Hopefully more than one will make it to freezing. There's always a chance an embryo won't survive the freeze and thaw cycle so you want more than one to help ensure there's something to transfer if you're working with frozen. We'll call again Saturday or Monday, I guess, and find out what happened.

Meanwhile, the embryos we transferred should be reaching blastocyst stage and hatching from their zona (the jelly-like shell human eggs have) about now. It'll be another week or two before we know if we had one or more implant. Part of me is hoping for twins, but that would most certainly make for a rough pregnancy. So I guess I'm hoping for an unusually smooth twin pregnancy. I'll readily settle for a single, though.

Wish us luck!

Nine Eggs Fertilized

We went in for the egg retrieval and sperm collection yesterday and just got the fertilization report this morning: Nine fertilized out of an attempted 18. If I recall correctly, last time we had five out of about a dozen, so we're doing better.

The retrieval and collection went about like last time, except for being cold and rainy and my wife's recovery from the anesthesia taking a bit longer. They used a bit more this time because, and we just learned this Sunday, she was moving around a bit during the procedure last time. After she came out of it she was fine except for her blood pressure being a bit low. They monitored her for a while to make sure it was at least stable and finally let us go around 1PM after a call to our doctor for approval. The procedure had been around 9:30.

The sperm collection went a bit better than the first time, or at least the scrub-up before was much less messy. I left a bit of water on the floor the first time. I also don't recall being instructed to scrub to the elbows last time. Hmmm. It didn't seem to hurt things that I didn't then. The collection was in the same room as last time. (Did I ever post the pictures I took of te decor? I'll check and edit them into this post tonight if not.) They had some of the same magazines and some new ones. I went with the new ones, settling on a recent Penthouse. Black Tail also gets credit for an assist.

After they released us we drove to a nearby mall and ate at Panera. We both had some hot soup. It was good to get some food in our stomachs. I hadn't had anything but a glass of orange juice all day, and my wife hadn't had anything at all since the night before. (Though they did give her a few crackers and some ginger ale after the procedure.)

We had been planning for me to do some painting in the house, finally finishing a room where access to one end is blocked by our computer desks, and all the junk that naturally accumulates around them. With the long recovery and heavy post-Thanksgiving Sunday traffic, though, we didn't get home until after 4:30 so I didn't get much more done than mostly cleaning off my desk. I'll do some more tonight, but save the computer removal for last.

The embryo transfer will be Wednesday. We're still waiting for the time. They're supposed to call us tomorrow once they know which couples will be doing what that day. Hopefully we'll have enough develop well to leave us some to freeze. If they all do well I'm inclined to put back four to maximize our chances this time. Embryos don't always survive the freeze and thaw process, so having the other five frozen should give us enough for another try or two if we need it, or want another child later. It should be significantly less expensive and uncomfortable to do another cycle with frozen embryos.

Things can still go wrong, but so far it's better than last time and we've corrected what problems we can that we identified from the first try. I think our chances are good.

Further IVF Developments

Well, we've had a couple more progress checks since my last entry, Wednesday and Thursday. Yes, we went in for a check on Thanksgiving day. The appointment was for 11:30, but we had to get blood drawn by 8:00AM. It's an hour drive away and not a heck of a lot of stores are open that early on a normal day, much less Thanksgiving, so we brought the books we are currently reading. (Mine is The Years of Rice And Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.) Bob Evans was closed, but IHOP was open, so we had breakfast there. After that we went to the doctor's office and hung out in the lobby until they opened the door. By then, a few other patients had arrived, but since we were the first there we got to see him first.

Things are coming along. We have another check Friday at 11:00. I guess we'll do a little shopping or something between the 8:00AM blood draw and then, but frankly I'm a little afraid of the "Black Friday" crowds. We normally work or just stay in that day. I guess we'll bring the books again. The follicles look good. There are a few more follicles than last time, I believe, and their development is much more in sync so we expect to get more good eggs out of them. In reviewing and comparing the first cycle with the doctor today we learned that of the nine eggs they had attempted to fertilize then (with ICSI) only five were mature and expected to fertilize, and all of them did. The others were immature. There were more follicles than that, but the others were apparently overripe and the eggs broke during retrieval. We put back the best three, and the other two then lived on and developed further than expected. What all that tells us is that with eggs at the right development we get good hardy embryos. As long as we're not "cooking" them too long, we should get plenty this time, hopefully with enough left over to freeze for a third or further attempt or a try at another baby down the road. We expect to be triggering tomorrow for retrieval Sunday and transfer Wednesday. Then comes the hardest part: the maddening wait for that positive pregnancy test.