How do you say hamburger in Spanish?

   It's difficult to describe what we were feeling through all of this.  We're just scraping the top of a whole mess of emotions with this bog.  I know that I've forgotten quite a bit that should be in here.  I still hope that this is informative for anyone that is seeking fertility or adoption.  I'm excited that people are reading our story.  Lucky for every one reading, this will be the last time you get to read about my uterus.  

  Determined to have our biological child, we went through our finances.  Over and over again.  There was just no way that we could pay $24,000 to have a baby.  If we did and it didn't work...that would be it.  We wouldn't even be able to afford to adopt a child.  We wanted to give it one last try though.  There had to be other options.  So, I hit Google!!  After hours of research, I had found a few places that did donor egg IVF.  Czech Republic, Madrid or Costa Del Sol Spain.  The Madrid clinic had the highest success rates, so that was the one that we chose.  So, with some money help from our family we put plans in action.  We started dealing with the IVF coordinator for the Spain clinics who worked at a sister clinic in Athens, Greece.  We were matched with an egg donor that had similar characteristics with me.  She was 5'3" , slight build, brown hair with blue-green eyes and she was a proven donor!!!  I still couldn't believe that we were going to fly to Spain to have this done for so much cheaper than it would've been here.  The donor egg IVF was costing us about $8,000.  After air, hotel and food the total came to about $14,000.  Why is it so much cheaper there?  They don't pay the donors.  The women that go through all of the stim shots and go through the egg retrieval do this as a pure act of kindness.  They help people like us with a dream of creating a family. 

  Trying to get my prescriptions ordered by our fertility clinic here by request of this IVF nurse in Athens was a HUGE pain.  I was put on birth control again for a couple months and about 2 weeks before we were due to leave the country, I had to get a Menopur shot.  This was supposed to put my body in a shut down state.  About a week before we left I started getting shots to get my uterine lining ready for the embryo transfer and I started getting shots to keep me from ovulating.  All we had to do was wait to leave.  I was sick about this.  I didn't want to leave the country.  I've never been on a plane for 13 hours before and I was pretty freaked out about that.  Plus Asia (our 16 year old husky) had been sick a couple months before.  Not a little sick either.  We really didn't think that she was going to pull through.  On top of that, when we had taken her to the vet to find out that she had Pancreatitis, they had also found a tumor the size of a softball in her stomach that was pushing her intestines into her upper body.  She was back to normal in about a week or so.  I was still so afraid that something was going to happen to her while we were gone and we were about to leave the country for 14 days!!  It was all I could think about. 

  Luckily our flight to Madrid was an overnight one and there isn't much to tell.  We took a cab to our hotel.  We wanted to stay in a hotel that was nice but affordable.  We didn't want to stay in a bad area and we figured that they wouldn't have a nice hotel in a bad part of town.  Our room was really small but the weirdest thing to us was the fact that instead of a wall separating the sleeping area from the bathroom it was frosted glass.  I know that we're married and all but we still want a little bit of privacy.  It was time to get out and see the city a little bit.  I rode a subway for the first time.  Not on my list of favorites in Madrid.  It was exhausting.  Plus  I was in a compact place with a ton of people staring.  I stuck out like a soar thumb.  Not a lot of blonds over there.  I'm a little curious what the thought process was on designing the subway system over there.  We would go upstairs, then downstairs just to go upstairs again!!  If you've ever seen the movie Labyrinth, this is what the subway reminded me of.  It really felt like the entire city was uphill.  Even walking downhill it felt like we were walking uphill.  Thank God for Ryan.  I have absolutely no sense of direction.  He navigated around that city like a champ!!  Our subway exit was a few blocks from the clinic.  When crossing one of the streets, I had tripped on the curb and fell in the street.  Ryan still had a hold of my hand and was dragging me.  Meanwhile there were cars just driving by looking at us.  I was laughing so hard I couldn't get up. 

  We really didn't know what to expect when we went for our first visit at the clinic.  It's was all white.  Very clean.  And our doctor was American!!!  She had informed us that they had done the retrieval on the donor earlier that day and they got 9 eggs!!!  Sure better than my 3 dud eggs.  They did ICSI using Ryan's swimmers on the eggs.  ICSI is when they use a tiny needle to insert the sperm into the egg.  We got a call the next day saying that all 9 of the eggs fertilized!!  We have embryos!!  They would keep us informed on weather we would do a 3 day transfer for a 5 day transfer.  On a 3 day transfer they no longer think that the quality of the embryo will get better, so they decide to go ahead and transfer them into the uterus.  On a 5 day transfer you've hit blastocyst stage.  The embryo has developed so much that it is starting to bust out of the shell.  This is the highest chance of implantation.  We transferred 3 beautiful blastocyst embryos on the 5th day.  Normally they don't transfer more than 2 but since we had some so far she transferred all 3.  Ryan called a taxi to take us back to our hotel.  I'm supposed to be on bed rest for the next 24 hours.  This might drive me crazy.  Did I mention that the only tv channels that were in English was a music channel and a type of investment channel?  Ryan gets me back to the hotel and gets me settled in then goes to get me something to eat.  He was only going to go up the block to grab me a hamburger.  He ended up being gone for about an hour!!  I was really starting to freak out wondering what was taking him so long.  It seemed like every time he would leave without me, I would hear sirens off in the distance.  If you saw the way people drive over there you would worry too.  I don't even know why they bother putting lines on the road.  It's just so different.  When he gets back, he informs me that the restaurant up the street closes for a while during the day then opens back up again around 8pm.  Apparently this is a common thing with restaurants there.  So my wonderful husband hops on and off the subway a couple times to go to McDonalds because that's pretty much the only place that has a hamburger the way that I want it.  I'm not adventurous when it comes to food.  I did try Topas over there which is thinly sliced pork and cheese on some bread.  A HAM AND CHEESE SANDWICH without condiments!!  Anyways, my amazing husbands adventure didn't just stop at McDonalds.  He hopped on the subway again and went to Starbucks for cheesecake.  I am one lucky girl.

   We weren't very vocal about why we were going to Madrid, so a lot of people just thought we were going on a vacation.  We went to the Palace and Retero Park while we were there, but this was far from a vacation.  I thought an IVF here was a lot of pressure.  That didn't even compare to this kind of pressure.  My body had one job to do...make a nice and cozy home for those three little embryos.   After all, I did have that "picture perfect" uterus that the doctors were talking about along with a 75% success rate, it's hard to not be optimistic. 

  Finally it was time to come home.  We were ready to get home to our family and our dogs.  Did I mention that we actually tried to Skype with the dogs?  Didn't really work out the way we planned, but at least we could see them and see that Asia was doing okay. 

  We wait the 15 days after the transfer and I go in for the blood pregnancy test.  I hadn't had any early signs of my cycle starting, so we were feeling pretty good!   We had taken the afternoon off of work.  We knew either way we were going to want to be around each other after we got the results.  Ryan always has the doctors office call him with any results.  I would rather hear any news from my husband.  Bad or good, he knows exactly how I feel because he's going through it too.  Donor egg IVF didn't work for us.  Our test was negative.   This was it.  No biological traits from either of us, but that's not what was hurting the most.  We're not going to experience all the little pregnancy symptoms that some women complain about.  We're not going to experience morning sickness, the sonograms, finding out if we're having a girl or a boy.  No talking to my stomach while the he or she  was growing inside me.  Or that feeling that's impossible to describe when I've given birth to our child.  None of this was for us.  We were chosen to go down a different road.  But just because it wasn't we had originally planned, that doesn't mean that it won't be any less amazing. WE'RE ADOPTING!!!