What's next.

I met a (pretty young) woman the other day who's pregnant with her sixth child. Six. How can some women just keep popping out babies like it's nothing? I get pretty jealous. I'd love to have six kids. But I'm pretty sure having more than one, maybe two, more is pretty much impossible.

I think we've ruled out adoption, for now. It might be in our future still, but for this next time around, I think we're trying the old-fashioned way one more time. We've fasted, we've prayed, I got my Patriarchal blessing, we've seen multiple specialists down at the University of Utah, and I've read more studies, articles, and forums online than I probably did my entire college career.

We know we're just about guaranteed to have one (most likely quite a few) miscarriages. One part of me wants to say that I hope they're early miscarriages, because losing another baby further along would be so so hard, and because putting my body through more c-sections gets riskier every time. But the other part doesn't totally mean that, because the little time I had with Brooklyn was so very precious. It's just about all I have. Though I'd imagine losing her was much harder than an early miscarriage would be, I'm still grateful she didn't leave me earlier. An earlier miscarriage would be hard because I wouldn't get time to know the little life growing inside of me.

Anyway, we know we have a hard road ahead of us still. We don't know when exactly we'll be beginning on that road yet. I know I need to be responsible and let my body heal from this c-section so that we don't have even more risks posed to us. We're scared but we have faith, somehow.

overload.

There is so much information to process about all this chromosome stuff. Seriously, I read so much about it and it is all so utterly confusing. Like today, I was finally thinking I was understanding it and I found out that if we decided to conceive naturally, our baby could have an entirely different disorder, Trisomy 14 (also known as a million different confusing names....yeah, that sure helps) other than just the prospective Down Syndrome.

And don't even get me started on this IVF-PGD junk. I tried tackling some of that yesterday and called Sterling bawling because I kept getting transferred around in a circle of departments at the Utah Center for Reproductive Medicine and everyone was asking me questions I didn't understand. Do they really expect someone who is calling for a consultation to be an expert?

Oh, and health insurance sucks. Even when you think you have a great plan, you don't. Your out-of-pocket expenses and deductible doubles without notice.

I wish someone could just tell me what to do from here. I sure don't know what decision to make. And I'm reeeeally tired of trying to figure it out. Just put a healthy, happy baby in my arms for me to love, please.

Oh, and Dear Jenelle from Teen Mom 2: You seem to have this inexplicable problem of purposely getting yourself knocked up then contemplating abortion. How about you just give me all these babies you can't decide if you want? I'd drive to South Carolina in a heartbeat, I promise.



.....okay, maybe watching dumb girls on MTV isn't the best thing for me to do in my current situation. But, seriously. Come on.

Test results, answers, and lots of decisions.

Yesterday we had an appointment with a high-risk obstetrician from the University of Utah. He gave us the results of our genetic testing--I'm a carrier for Robertsonian Translocation Down Syndrome. We discussed what this means for future pregnancies. Basically, we have a 50/50 chance of RT Downs in each pregnancy. Out of the 50% chance of not having it, the baby has an equal chance of being a carrier, like me, or being perfectly healthy and chromosomally normal. We don't know which category Brynleigh falls into, she'll have to be tested sometime in the future. Hopefully she isn't a carrier so she never has to go through this and face these hard choices.

Out of the 50% chance that a future baby would have Down Syndrome, there's a 15% chance the baby would just be born with it and  a 35% chance that we'd lose the baby sometime during the pregnancy (or I'd go into labor very early and lose the baby after birth, like Brooklyn). With that being said, this doctor thinks the RT Downs is why Brooklyn didn't make it, so we are thankful to have that answer now.

So essentially, there's only a 25% chance of us having a perfectly healthy baby with no negative consequences. Not the best odds.

Getting pregnant naturally just doesn't seem to be something that is in the cards for us at this point in our lives. We can't handle losing another sweet baby, and 35% is far too high. Even if we fell into that 15% of having a baby with RT Down Syndrome, the baby would be at a high risk for heart defects, leukemia, and other disorders/diseases that I don't want to see my child go through.

We'll be meeting with both a genetics counselor and an infertility specialist down in Salt Lake City soon. The infertility specialist will talk to us about our options of using IVF PGD (invitro fertilization preimplantation genetic diagnosis) to conceive. This is where we'd do IVF and they'd be able to look through our fertilized embryos and choose ones that are chromosomally normal to implant. We don't know exact details and rates of success yet, but the doctor said he believes the U of U fertility center has about a 65% success rate. IVF is not a fun process, and it is pretty dang expensive.

Our other option is adoption. We plan on meeting with LDS Family Services soon to discuss the ins and outs of adoption through them. Adoption is, of course, a difficult, emotional process to go through and it really intimidates me. But none of our options are easy in the least, and we know our family isn't complete yet. For now, we're learning all we can about our options and putting a lot of thought and prayer into determining what the best route is for us.