Congratulations!!!
I don’t have questions, just congratulations! (And welcome to the club: my 2 youngest are 4 and 6, and I’m a few weeks away from 47. Enjoy the ride - I’ve appreciated the process a lot more as an older mom. But be prepared. The first time someone congratulates you on your grandchild can be a little rough, but eventually it’s funny. And I am about the same age as the 2 grandmothers raising kindergarteners in Lily’s class.)
I like it! But what do we call the older kid, then? Or maybe he can be the Sapling? How about just Thing 1 and Thing 2?
I’m no good at this.
Well, they did their job, so I have to say that on the whole, I was pleased with them. There were two separate courses of drugs.
First, I had daily meds that made my ovaries ripen as many eggs as possible but kept me from ovulating, followed by a “trigger” shot that initiated the final maturation process just before they performed the egg retrieval. Except for the trigger, they were relatively easy. They used very fine subcutaneous needles that I injected into my stomach. When my aim was good, I barely felt it.
The doctors then retrieved the eggs, fertilized them, and visually monitored their growth. We also opted for genetic testing, which is not standard. Then, once they had a blastocyst that was developing well and genetically normal - it took two retrieval cycles to get one - I had to prepare for the transfer. This entailed BIG intramuscular shots of estrogen every three days and progesterone every day, and these had to go into my lower back/upper gluteal area. They were not as painful as you might think, but not cozy, either. I could do them, and did on a couple occasions, but for most of them, my husband was a champ and did them for me.
I didn’t really have too many side effects besides mild bloating, a tiny bit of breast tenderness, and so on, as well as some lingering redness/bruising/swelling with the intramuscular injections. Although my husband may beg to differ; we had one or two big fights while I was on the transfer-prep meds, and if I recall correctly, they may have been partly due to the fact that he couldn’t read my mind. So maybe add some irritability to the list.
My one real qualm with the drugs was that although my understanding is that they’re much safer and more effective than the stuff they used a decade ago or two, they’re still pretty risky. I was reading the patient information sheet for one of them, I don’t even remember which, and one of the things it said was basically, “This drug increases your risk of cancer.”
Welp. Them’s the breaks, I guess.
That was adorable. Of course, nerds that we are, we gladly explain to our kid in great detail exactly what’s going on in my uterus. We don’t volunteer information, though; we only answer his questions, so the whole “sex” thing hasn’t actually come up yet. And I can’t even begin to figure out how we’ll explain IVF. That one can wait, I think.
We were extremely lucky, and our insurance covered the majority of it after we paid the deductible. The prescriptions were a huge hassle, though. We had to go through a mail-order pharmacy, and there was some kind of Catch-22 at first where we needed some kind of approval to get the prescriptions, but we needed the prescriptions to get the approval. Eventually it got sorted, but we ended up paying for a good chunk of the medications out-of-pocket. And we paid for all the genetic testing, since that was optional.
As for fertility assistance: when we started trying, I began charting my cycles (using basal body temperature and ovulation prediction kits). I found that my cycles varied, but tended to be on the short side, about 25 days. This wouldn’t be an issue in and of itself, but I also found that I was ovulating on day 19 or 20. This meant that even if an egg fertilized, there was usually not enough time for it to implant before my period started - just 5 or 6 days, while the “norm” is anywhere from 10 to 16 days. My gynecologist also told me that some of my hormone levels indicated I might have a slightly low egg reserve. So we talked with a fertility specialist, and discussed the various options. The one data point that really stuck out to us, was that in a typical woman my age (40), a majority of her eggs are genetically abnormal. We realized that even if we could get a successful pregnancy started using less intensive treatments (like hormonal support to lengthen my cycle and/or IUI), there was a good chance that the embryo would stop developing and I would miscarry, or it would keep developing abnormally and we might choose to terminate. And not only would either of those situations be horrible to go through, they would also waste precious time if we wanted to try again. We basically decided that if we were going to do this, we were going to give it the best odds we could, so we dove in at the deep end with IVF and genetic testing. And it’s good we did - after the first retrieval, there were a couple of eggs that fertilized and developed pretty well, but genetic testing found they were abnormal. If we had gone ahead and tried to implant one of them, we might still be trying, or we might have given up by now.
Ah, yes; I know this very well. My parents were actually pretty old when they had me - my mom was 38, and my dad was 47(!) - so I got to hear this often as a kid. I’m hoping that the increase in the number of older moms will start to make it a little more normal. Plus, I may look like a grownup, but I certainly don’t act like one, so maybe instead of “grandma” I can pull off “extremely haggard mom” for a while. Fingers crossed!
I’m 43, my wife’s 39, and we have 2 boys - a 2 year old and a nearly 5 year old.
We’re BARELY on the older edge for all the various preschooler groups and activities that we attend in our area, including our kids’ preschool. I’d say the average age is probably somewhere around 37-38 or so, unless these people just seem older than they are.
Congrats, though my wife has you beat.
We had twins via IVF in October. She was 45 at the time.
We went through two rounds. The first implantation failed, which really really sucked. The second time worked and our boys are doing great. They were born 1 day short of 34 weeks and spent some time in the nicu.
The boys are now doing awesome, starting to crawl and get about. Mom is doing ok, she has some medical issues due to (most likely- my guess) the meds and will be getting a hysterectomy later this month which ought to resolve that problem.
Otherwise everything is great. Though the meds before the implantation were a bit crazy. My beautiful, amazing wife was, to put it nicely, absolutely freaking nuts while getting the hormones.
Slee
Congrats!
Coke or Pepsi?
And relevant to that, are you abstaining from caffeine?
This makes me feel a little better. I’m 47 and my wife is 35 and our first child is due in August. I was kind of worried about being the “old guy with a baby” but maybe I won’t be the only one. 
Yay! Congratulations! Go on with your bad self, Mrs. sleestak! And so glad the boys are doing well. I’m sorry to hear about her troubles with the meds, though. Like I said, I didn’t really feel significantly crazier on them, but of course, I may not be the best judge of that, and also, it depends on the person and which meds they’re taking. I will say, however, that for me, just the process itself was totally crazy-making and demoralizing.
It’s hard not to feel like you’re old and decrepit when you can’t do this thing that your body is supposed to be “designed” to do, especially when you did it just fine on your own when you were younger. Every injection was a reminder that my body was no longer firing on all cylinders. And every time there was a delay - and it seemed there was always a delay of some kind, some reason why we had to wait until the start of my next cycle to begin the next part of the treatment - the wait was agonizing, because I knew that the chance of getting “good” eggs was declining with every passing second. Add on top of that inconvenience of frequent - sometimes daily - monitoring appointments and blood draws, the stress of dealing with the insurance company and the pharmacy, and the fact that all of this was preceded by months of trying - and failing - on our own, including one month where I’m pretty sure I had a chemical pregnancy. Just… gah. Hormones or not, it was pretty sucktastic. So again, congratulations to both of you for getting through it!
Vernors. As for caffeine, I’m abstaining-ish. I never really drink caffeinated soda anyway, but I love coffee too much to give it up entirely. I’ve switched to unleaded, but I still have about a half a mug most mornings. And I’m still eating chocolate, which you will pry from my cold, dead hands.
Congrats! Nah, you’ll fit right in. Plus, you’ve got two things going for you: men’s skin tends to make them appear younger than women of the same age, and society seems to be much more judgmental of older moms than older dads (thanks, patriarchy!). For real, though, you’ll be fine. It was a long time before I realized how much older my dad was than everyone else’s, and it never mattered.
Thanks! I like to think I look young for my age. Congrats to you too.
Nah… I’m maybe in the older half of dads at my sons’ preschool, but the guy who’s really out of place is the guy in his 20s with a 2 year old kid, surprisingly enough, not the guy in his 50s whose third kid is a 5 year old.
I had the same fears though, having our first kid when I was 38; I felt like I was going to be old enough to be the other dads’ father as well. Didn’t turn out that way though.
Cool. I was probably worrying too much about it anyway. Thanks for the reassurance!