Send in the Clown

Adan, kids, their dad, and my sister - Their Dad got out last week!

I usually try to write a blog post when there's been a major milestone met in our surrogacy journey. Or when a big decision has been made.

Not for this blog post.  I mean, something ginormous happened, something terrible and heartbreaking, too...But I kinda feel like a juggler (a clown maybe) and all of my balls that I threw are midair and I am trying to make sure I catch at least a few of them, not knowing which ones I'll be able to land in my hands, wishing with all my heart to keep juggling.  Does that make sense, people?  Lemme explain.

Jakey started baseball...With COVID restrictions :-/

Last week we got the frustrating and tragic news that because of the Coronavirus our doctors are requiring that all out-of-state egg donors stay in Madison for their entire transfer.  They want to be able to monitor the egg donor for the entire eighteen days, having, in a sense, complete control over her.  Normally, they'd have her come out twice for about three days each.  But they're worried that she could be exposed to the pandemic while partaking in all of that traveling back and forth.  Our egg donor is from California don't forget.

Took the kids to the beach - Yes, that's Ella's boyfriend!

Anyways, our egg donor is unable to travel and be away from home for that amount of time.  I guess she recently got a new job.  It's a perfect storm of unlucky situations (from COVID to an out-of-state egg donor to her having a new job), and it really fricken sucks.  Our surrogacy journey has been wrought with unlucky circumstances.  Especially because now we may have to weasel our way out of our egg donor agreement...Which means we would not get back our nonrefundable $7,000.  (We gave the Egg Donation, Inc. about $15,000 total.)  $7000!  Seven thousand dollars!  That's seven $1,000 bills. I can't even bear to type it out.  I've never spent that much money on, well, NOTHING ever before in my life!  It's depressing and infuriating.  It simply makes me extremely sad.  All of it.  Last week, I was really upset about it and couldn't even talk to anyone about it.  There were tears and angry phone calls and desperate emails and many, many glasses of wine.

The family celebrating Jacob!

But lets get back to the balls.  (That's what she said!) There is hope.  As I was saying with the juggler metaphor, I'm just unsure of which balls I'll catch and be juggling with by the end of the month.  Here's an explanation of all the balls:

Ball #1: Our egg donor hasn't 100% said she'd not come out to Wisconsin for the eighteen day transfer.  She did at first.  And now she's trying to maybe take off work and see if she can make it happen.  Sooo....We're waiting on this final confirmation, either way.  If this miraculously transpires, we would not lose the $7000.

Ball #2: Our fertility clinic does have an Hispanic egg donor that we could utilize.  She's been completely evaluated and approved by our doctors.  She wouldn't technically be ready for a transfer until August.  But we do have her as an option.

Ball #3: The Surrogacy Center and Wisconsin Fertility Institute are currently searching for other Hispanic egg donors in Wisconsin.  It's an extremely small pool and there might not be any...Literally. I will get the inevitable comments from readers that will say "I have some eggs for you!"  LoL.  But please know that I will deny you.  Haha.  I do not want any connections or ties to anybody I know with our surrogacy.  I want this baby to be ours and only ours.  I'm done with dealing with family and I don't want to "share" the love in any way anymore :-)

Ball #4: There's a little chance that our doctors will allow us to use frozen eggs.  They typically do not like to because it ends up in fewer options for us.  In other words, with fresh eggs, we will have a plethora of healthy fertilized eggs to choose from and that's the way our doctors like it.  If we can use frozen eggs, there's plenty of Hispanic egg donors to choose from all around the country.  However, we'll have to start over again with that process...Making a new egg donor agreement, getting the egg donor medically cleared, etc.  Ugh!

Ball #5: Because all of this happened so recently, I haven't even been able to ask all the questions and do all the research yet...So this ball is more of a question for my doctors that I'll have to ask...But why can't we just use our California egg donor and have her freeze her eggs?  I think they'll say they want to "monitor her" themselves during that process, so it'd be impossible.  But that is one thing that I will need to find out this week.  There's many more things I need to research and evaluate and learn about in the next week or two...There'll be a ton of emails and phone calls!

Ball #6: We could just use a white girl egg donor.  Since Adan and I are now mixing our sperm and we don't quite know whose baby it will be, it doesn't matter that our egg donor is Hispanic.  Whatever the reason, I really would like our baby to be Hispanic/Latino though.  Call me racist, I guess.  I also really want our baby to be bilingual.  So yeah...Still holding out hope for a Half-Mexican Lil' One!

Ball #7: Our lawyer still might be able to get our $7000 back.  He has reiterated to us that there was no way anybody could've predicted the pandemic and how it has turned our world into The Upside Down.  It's not our fault at all.  I suppose you could maybe say it's our doctor's fault to have made this decision.  But I feel like it's our lawyer's job to get that money back or at least fight for it.  He hasn't even tried yet because we're still waiting on the final word from our egg donor in California.  We shall have to wait and see how this goes but hopefully he Grubers the hell out of it and gets our money back!

Ball #8: Adan and I remain childless for the rest of our lives.  Yes, that would mean giving up on our dream and losing out on a lot of money.  But maybe it'd be nice to have a life solely for ourselves?  We could travel more!  We could go out for drinks and dinners more!  We could have a nicer house!  We could relax and sleep in more!  To be honest, this ball, that I've pondered many times before, is looking more and more inviting :-)

My best friend and I <3

Alright.  So I think that's all the balls.  Dayum!  That's a lot balls!  And usually I dig balls.  But I'm not enjoying them in this situation.  Bah!  There's so many confusing decisions to make that are not even decisions yet...We're still waiting for them to decide to be decisions.  And then we gotta decide!

Hazel doing her last days of online learning at home

I am hoping that for the next blog post I will have an idea of what balls I am juggling with.  Who knows?  Maybe I won't even be juggling anymore.  Maybe I'll just be standing there.  With one single happy ball in my hands.  Ready and confident and content, knowing exactly what the future holds.  No more balls in my face at all.

Me...Lookin' fishy :-)

Okay.  I'm not going to write the word "balls" anymore. I can hear y'all giggling you immature lil' shits ;-)