Help me! I'm melting!

A constant source of interest among bloggers is visitor statistics. We like to know who are readers are, where they're from, and how they found us. In my case, many of my visitors find me while performing a Google search for one term or another. Sometimes the search terms are unusual (I had a hit for "underwear parade" earlier today), and many border on lewd or even outright perverse in nature. Many people want to know more about potty training, especially as it pertains to little boys. It would also seem that many people are making travel plans to Amsterdam, as I frequently receive visitors searching for touring suggestions in this fabulous city. I get a lot of hits from people looking for information on pregnancy and fertility-related subjects (and interestingly enough, the overwhelming majority of these hits originate in India, which leads me to wonder about the availability of pregnancy-related literature in this vast, fascinating country), to the point where I've considered creating a page or blog entry that consists almost solely of helpful pregnancy and fertility links. I hope to get to this little project as soon as I have some free time on my hands (one of these years...).

If I had to pick the single topic that draws the greatest number of visitors, it would probably be music, and 80s music in particular. People are always searching for their favorite songs and artists, not to mention quirky bits of song and artist-related trivia (the terms "Nena hairy armpits" pop up more frequently than I'd have imagined...). I get a tremendous number of hits from people looking for songs using random song lyrics. Sometimes, the lyrics are spot on, and other times, I'm rather surprised that the correct song was actually found, given how far off the mark the person's guess was, in comparison to the actual lyrics. Occasionally, I just stare at the line of text, wondering how someone decided to search using those specific terms (such as the recent searches for the term "Diggy dang diggy diggy".

Of course, we all know how hard it can be to understand the lyrics of some songs, and can't help but smile once we discover what the actual lyrics are. I've gotten some doozies since I started, but none of them even come close to the one I discovered in my stats this morning. Back in May, I wrote an 80s Music Video Sunday entry featuring the song "I Melt with You", by Modern English, a rather catchy tune, and to be honest, I've never considered the lyrics to be all that unintelligible. Maybe I couldn't pick up every word, but I wouldn't have had any outrageous misunderstandings (and certainly none with any potentially anti-Semitic undertones...), which is why the water I was drinking almost shot out my nose when I noticed that someone had come across my blog by searching for "I'll stop the world and melt the jews".

Ummmm... Yeah... Exactly...

Somewhere in The Bronx right now, sits an individual who (I hope) is utterly astonished at having gotten this one so, so wrong.

Keeping Busy, Helping Others

Life is hectic hectic hectic these days. While trying to meet my deadlines for the next edition of the Diplomatic Post, I've also been blogging over at Israelity, getting work done at the day job, trying to clean up the house in prior to my parents' arrival last Thursday afternoon and fighting off a stomach virus. I was supposed to attend what promised to be an interesting meeting last Wednesday, but my stomach wasn't having any of it, and it looks like I'll have to play catch-up by picking the brains of those friends whose health was clearer in better shape than mine.

I've also gotten myself marginally involved in another project of interest. As those of you who read this blog are probably aware, the journey to bring the Little One into the world was not a journey of smooth sailing. There were problems every step of the way, and more than our fair share of tragedies. After we lost our first son, I made a promise to myself that whenever I could draw on my experiences to help others, I would do so. For me, doing so would mean that everything we had been through had not been completely in vain. Several months ago, I was contacted by Angie Boss, co-author of a book called "Living with PCOS". She and her co-author, Evelina Sterling (herself the author of a book about egg donation), were in the process of writing a new book about funding fertility treatments. Angie had come across my blog, liked what she'd read, and wondered if I would be interested in sharing different aspects of my story for her book. I was happy to help, and am pleased to have the opportunity to take part in a project that will help other women who are going through experiences similar to mine. After coming to an agreement with regard to certain technical aspects of my contribution, I sent Angie several pages that I'd written, and in subsequent correspondence, she asked if I would mind posting the text to below to my blog. I periodically receive similar requests, and those most are turned down as a matter of my own personal policy, I was happy to acquiesce to Angie's request. Take a moment to read it. If you or someone you know can help, please do so. Most of the people I know who have gone through fertility treatments of one kind or another have always been hungry for information on all aspects of the subject, including myself. I read anything I could get my hands on (especially personal stories), so the more information that's out there, the better.

The Request...

"We are currently co-authoring a new book to be published by Simon &Schuster next fall called "Funding Fertility—How to Bring Home a Baby without Breaking the Bank." In this book, we address many of the barriers associated with paying for the high costs related to infertility treatments and adoption. This includes the "sticker shock" that we all get when we find out how much everything is going to cost, how to make cost-effective decisions (i.e., finding cheaper medication options, selecting certain clinics, undergoing certain procedures, considering "special deals") without sacrificing quality of care, actually having to come up with the money without completing going broke, dealing with insurance companies and the lack of coverage, and much, much more.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!!! We are currently compiling stories from people struggling with infertility (or considering adoption)—either currently, in the past, or in the future—to include in our book. These stories can highlight the good, the bad, or the ugly in terms of having to come up with the money to pay for your treatments and/or adoption. Through this book, we hope to shed more light on this nearly completely fee-for-service (and not covered by insurance!) side of medicine so we can allow more of the 10 million people out there experiencing infertility access to the ability to have a baby that they so desperately want without having to suffer financially. Having a baby should be a basic human right available to everyone, not a commodity in which some people make a lot of money! Please help us change the current system for the better by sharing your stories and experiences.

You can remain anonymous and all correspondence will be treated with utmost confidentiality. PLEASE SEND ALL STORIES, EXPERIENCES, AND QUESTIONS TO FUNDINGFERTILITY@YAHOO.COM.

Thanks so much for your help!

Evelina Sterling and Angie Boss"

In memory of little boys

When I was pregnant with our first son, at a time when I believed that we had cleared the hurdles of our previous pregnancies and had finally broken our curse of bad luck, a friend mentioned that sometimes, once that stage of pregnancy was reached, if I laughed or coughed, I might, well, to put it bluntly, leak a little. I filed that bit of information away for safe keeping, and soldiered on. One night, I woke with a horrible leg cramp, and while walking it off, I suddenly felt a great deal of liquid runnng down my legs. While racing to the bathroom, I silently chastised my friend, thinking that she had greatly under-exaggerated, and that what I'd just experienced was quite a bit more than a little leak. And then I realized that the "leak" hadn't stopped. We grabbed our pregnancy books, and it slowly dawned on me that what I was experiencing was a premature rupture of the membranes, a very premature rupture. We quickly drove to the hospital, where our worst fears were confirmed. My waters had broken in the 25th week of pregnancy, and so the nightmare began.

I suddenly found myself lying in a hospital bed, getting up only to go to the bathroom or to shower. I was lonely, miserable and frightened, and there was nothing I could do about any of it. All we could do was wait, knowing that the longer our baby stayed inside me, the greater his chances were for survival. Together, we managed to hold on for about a week, which is when I began having terrible stomach pains. These pains, of course, turned out to be contractions, and a few hours later, following an emergency c-section, our first son was born, weighing all of 700 grams. And all of this occurred nine years ago today.

The next six-and-a-half months were perhaps the most intensely draining I've ever experienced. The first four months were spent in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). As many parents of premature babies will tell you, it was like being on an emotional rollercoaster, where some days went by without a hitch (which is considered a good day), and other days the situation took a turn for the worse, and you fear that all is lost. You can assess how serious your case is by the seniority of the staff member who explains things, and we were practically on a first-name basis with the director of the neonatal department. To this day, we are in touch with the staff members there, who are still a part of our extended family, and no one was more excited than they were when the Little One was born, just over three years ago. Anyway, after those initial four months we transferred to a children's hospital in the center of the country, and spent the next two-and-a-half months doing shifts, in order to ensure that at least one of us was there at all times. Some days we both stayed, just so that we could see one another for more than a few hours at a time. Once all surgeries were behind us and our baby seemed to be on the mend, we finally began to talk about taking him home, but then he got sick again, and he just couldn't fight anymore.

As I said, this all happened nine years ago. We have, for the most part, moved on with our lives, and we have been blessed with the Little One, whose mission seems to be to keep us on our toes at all times. The loss is always back there somewhere, but it doesn't rule my life; it doesn't define who I am. My life is the normal life of any sleep-deprived, caffeine-craving mother of a toddler – indeed, many of the people who entered my life after this period have no idea it even took place. It's always there somewhere, though, somewhere in the back of my head, waiting to surface as life dictates. It surfaced a few weeks ago with the sickness and death of that little boy, and obviously, it surfaced again now, on what would have been our child's ninth birthday.

On the day of the other little boy's funeral, I began to think about words that a bereaved mother might find comforting. I was on the train, coming home late at night, and the phrases started coming together in my mind. When I got home, I grabbed a pen and paper, and the words just tumbled out as I thought of two little boys whose lives were cut short. I've never really considered poetry to be one of my strengths, but this is what I wrote...

"Fragile little arms wrapped tightly 'round my neck. Through love and pain, laughter and tears, fragile little arms remain, wrapped tightly 'round my neck.

Time is playing games again and nothing stays the same, save fragile little arms wrapped tightly 'round my neck.

Worlds are spinning, moving, crashing; the grip is growing lighter. Pulling, tugging,
wrenching free, fragile little arms wrapped loosely 'round my neck.

The warmth around my neck is gone, replaced by shards of ice and stone. Checking once, checking twice, unbelieving, not accepting that fragile little arms are gone.

Fragile little arms float freely now, drifting through the skies, softly, slowly drifting, off to parts unknown. Gently oh so gently, fragile little arms are safe again, wrapped forever 'round my heart."

An eggstra special conviction

In an entry that I wrote back in September 2005, I briefly described the long, painful journey we took in order to bring our son into the world. I won't rehash it all now, but I will tell you that one of the paths we chose involved three failed rounds of egg donation treatment. Legislation in Israel regarding egg donation is changing, and to be honest, I'm not sure where things stand these days. When we elected to go down that road several years ago, however, the laws stated that only women who were undergoing fertility treatment could donate eggs. There were no donor banks like those that exist for sperm donation, and women who were not undergoing fertility treatment themselves could not volunteer to donate eggs. As a result of these policies, there was a shortage of donated eggs. Understandably, many women undergoing treatment found it difficult to give up something that had taken so much to obtain, and I didn't blame them for wanting to do the maximum ensure success, for not wanting to sacrifice the few chances they had.

There were other issues as well. I wondered about the quality of the eggs being donated, given that they were coming from women who were themselves having trouble conceiving, a problem that can stem from a multitude of factors, whether they be age-related, genetic, or simply a question of the woman's ability to produce good-quality ova. I also wondered how donors and recipients were matched, as I naively wanted a donor who had similar physical features to ours. We continued to make the rounds of various specialists to discuss our options, and while I don't remember much of what was said, the one thing I do remember is that the waiting list for receiving donated eggs was very long, and it could take more than a year until we reached the top of the list.

And then in 2000, the scandal broke. A senior gynecologist and fertility specialist was accused of giving several of his patients who were undergoing fertility treatment dangerously high doses of hormones so that they would produce very large amounts of eggs. Each of the women had previously agreed to donate some of their eggs, and the doctor was accused of harvesting the eggs in order to sell them to other infertile women. Needless to say, the (already low) number of women who were prepared to donate eggs plummeted, while demand for such eggs did not. Many Israeli fertility clinics halted egg donation procedures in the wake of the scandal, and any remaining thoughts we had of having the procedure performed in Israel via our health maintenance fund disappeared. There were almost no eggs available, nor would there be any available in the foreseeable future. This one doctor and his cohorts had single-handedly destroyed the egg donation option in Israel. Women had previously considered donating their eggs were no longer interested, terrified by the knowledge that an unscrupulous doctor had endangered the health and the lives of his patients undergoing the same procedure.

We went through two egg donation cycles abroad – one in London and one in Madrid. We considered cycling in the US, but the costs and the logistics were prohibitive, and we discovered that we could work with top-rated European clinics for much less than the cost of average US clinics. Each treatment cycle required two trips to Europe, not to mention the incredible amount of work that was necessary to coordinate schedules, reproductive cycles, flights (including one flight to Madrid on three days' notice) and accommodations. Research of the various medications was also required, in order to ensure that I would be able to purchase in Israel the drugs that were being prescribed in Europe. Time off had to be arranged from work – sometimes on very short notice.

And in the end, both cycles failed. We managed to do a third cycle in Israel that involved sending sperm to Romania to fertilize eggs provided by an anonymous Romanian donor, then having the fertilized eggs frozen and flown back to Israel for transfer. While legal, it was still rather murky, and involved quite a bit of hassle with our HMO, as we would have to pay out of our own pockets, but they might be willing to reimburse for part of the amount. The Romanian option came as a solution for women who for one reason or another could not seek out private treatment abroad as we had done. There were several similar options involving Romania, Poland, and Greece (and probably other countries where legislation is vague and treatment is inexpensive), and many of them involved some level of partnership and cooperation between fertility specialists in Israel and the foreign clinics. Some involved one or both partners flying abroad, others involved only the transfer of frozen sperm and fertilized ova between the two countries (as we had done). An entire industry was cropping up to fill the great hole that was created primarily as a result of the scandal in 2000.

I believe that Israeli legislation is being changed in order to allow any woman to donate eggs. Passing such a law would be a positive step that will allow great numbers of Israeli women to pursue dreams of creating a family, filling a painful void that cannot possibly be fully understood by someone who has never been in that situation. In the meantime, I felt great satisfaction this morning when I read this article. Seven years after the scandal first broke, Dr. Zion Ben-Raphael has been convicted by a Health Ministry disciplinary panel of "conduct unbecoming a doctor and violating patients rights laws", and will hopefully be appropriately punished for his actions. I'm not sure what punishment would be considered sufficient in light of all the damage he caused – damage to the credibility of an entire industry, and damage to the hopes of thousands of Israeli women in need of donor eggs, but punishment for the guilty parties coupled with an increased level of public awareness and changes to existing legislation will hopefully create an environment where the obstacles along the often painful journey to parenthood can be minimized as much as possible, no matter what kind of treatment is needed in order to complete the journey.

Hey, pregnant ladies! Take care of yourselves!

According to my medical chart when I was in the hospital last year for a pregnancy-related procedure, I have what is known in medspeak as "BOH" - Bad Obstetric History". It took about nine years, five natural pregnancies, three failed egg donation attempts (including two that took us to Europe - gotta love fertility tourism), a wide variety of fetal birth defects, nearly every invasive test out there, meetings with an assortment of geneticists (I even have one of my own now), and the loss of one preemie to finally have our son. It's been a wild, emotional roller coaster, and I wouldn't wish what we've been through on anyone. And, when we finally did manage to succeed, the pregnancy was fraught with peril. I won't go into the details, but let's just say that I was ordered to stay home (not in bed, thank god!) from the 16th week, following an emergency surgical procedure. Difficult pregnancy, long labor, difficult birth. High-risk all the way around.

Through all the pregnancies, I did everything right. Gave up caffeine, no heavy lifting, no alcohol, drugs, etc. Didn't over-exert myself. According to my geneticist, I've got defective genes somewhere, but no one has been able to figure out which genes (and samples have been sent all over Europe and the US at this point) are causing the problems. All the geneticists she's spoken to, both in Israel and outside of Israel (she mentions my case at different forums, meetings, etc.) think it sounds terribly interesting, but no one has a clue as to where the problems lie. All we know is that I was born with a few rare birth defects (all fixed, and you'd never have a clue from looking at me), and in three out of the first four pregnancies, there were birth defects - different defects in each pregnancy, all severe (the fourth one ended in spontaneously, so we don't know if there were defects or not, though we assume there must have been).

Needless to say, I'm more than a little sensitive when it comes to issues of taking care of one's self during pregnancy. When you repeatedly do everything you're supposed to and it still doesn't work, you get really frustrated. You look at other pregnant women and wonder why you can't seem to get it right. Other women make it look so easy, yet you just keep failing. It's awful. So, I'm sure you can all imagine how angry I get when I see pregnant women abusing their bodies, not taking care of themselves. My neighbor is pregnant with her second child - still in the first trimester, I believe. And, as she did with her first, she is continuing to smoke. We are quite friendly, and it's not like she doesn't know the risks (or maybe she does, but it's certainly not my place to tell her), but when I see her light up, knowing that she has this little creature growing inside of her, it makes me crazy. I just don't get it! How can a woman knowingly endanger her unborn child? It takes all of my strength not to let her have it, and it's not easy to hold back.

I remember when I was in the hospital after giving birth. Another woman who had just been wheeled into my room after giving birth asked the nurse if she could get up - she wanted to go outside for a cigarette. She had literally just come from the delivery room! I heard her confide to the nurse that she hadn't given up smoking during the pregnancy, then later on in the day, I heard her talking on the phone to a friend, wondering why the baby was smaller than she'd expected. Gee, do you think maybe there could have been a connection? Ok, not definitely, but maybe, just maybe, the smoking could have been a contributing factor, hmmm? I just wanted to shake her.

For women who have never had problems getting and staying pregnant and then having healthy children, they most likely haven't got a clue what it's like for those of us who agonized over each period, whose lives were lived according to the color of a pee stick, the tests, the failures, the out of control hormones, etc. They just assume that everything's going to work, and it usually does.

For many of us, it doesn't. Many women (couples) are still waiting for their "happily ever after", for the chance to be parents, to experience the wonderful world of parenting (I almost cried with joy the first time we walked outside, the three of us holding hands - it was a dream come true). It is painful, more than you can possibly imagine if you haven't been there. What makes it even worse though, is to see other women taking their condition for granted and not taking care of themselves as they should, knowing that they will still probably have a successful pregnancy, when no matter what you do to take care of yourself, you probably won't succeed. It hurts like hell.

Not sure how to close this, other than to say please, ladies, if you're pregnant, take care of yourselves! Take care of that precious little life growing inside of you! It's a privilege to be pregnant and have children, and should be treated as such. Not everyone has this privilege, and to abuse it is simply criminal.

Just want to add that I am actually very strongly pro-choice. A woman's body is her own and nobody else's. However, if you choose to continue your pregnancy and have your baby, for god's sake, take care of it!