If you have been following my previous posts, I am continuing with a description of how J.O., my son, came into my life. Read my previous posts to review the story from the beginning. Also, sorry for the brief interlude where I took a little turn off the main road for a moment of passionate opinion.
So, in about a month I ended the consulting project that I had been working on and made an appointment with the specialist, which was in about 2 weeks. Finally the meeting date came. I was so anxious. I was very determined to have a child, but I also did not really know what it meant to do IVF. In our first meeting with the specialist he introduced himself and said, “So, you are interested in in vitro fertilization?” I responded, “We are not interested in in vitro fertilization. We are going to do in vitro fertilization.” I immediately got his attention and he could see that I was a very determined woman.
In those days, and maybe it is true today, typically there was a hierarchy of steps that you had to go through to address infertility. Typically you could not just jump in and do IVF. Other fertility methods had to be tried first. I am not sure why it was this way or if it is still that way today. Perhaps it was a convenient way for the health care industry to take advantage of desperate situations and make more money. Cynical? Not really, just very observant.
So once the specialist heard about my history of eptopic pregnancies, there was no problem moving straight forward to the discussion of IVF. The specialist described, in detail, the entire process and the risks associated with the process. During this discussion I asked the specialist what were the chances of us accomplishing this. His response was, “Well, your old and you smoke.” He continued to explain how age and smoking negatively affect the process. Well there wasn’t anything I could do about my age. I had just turned 40 years old two weeks earlier, and there is not much more I can say about that issue. But his statement about smoking caught my attention. I quit smoking that very day in that very moment. I had smoked for over 20 years. I had tried quitting many times, but it never lasted. It is funny how circumstances in life can change your motivation to do things. That concept seems to be a prevailing theme throughout my life.
More to come later. . .