A sibling for Liam… South Africa here we come again for the 4th time xox

So what’s been happening in our world…..

Once we were pregnant with Liam, we knew we wanted a sibling for him but we only had 2 embryo’s from our donor and transferred both and were pregnant with Liam…

Being older parents, we knew that we won’t be around for as long as younger parents and with a small family on both sides we wanted Liam to have a sibling that he was close to and they would be there for each other.

Our fertility clinic, Cape Fertility knew we were interested in doing another donor cycle with our egg donor there and in October 2015 they contacted us urgently to say our donor was doing a cycle but the recipients had pulled out and as Shane had left behind sperm in the freezer, would be interested in using it for our donors egg collection…  wow…. I rang Shane and immediately we agreed it felt right… so we did it all from a distance lol..

We ended up with 3 great embryo’s and 2 morula’s… so we thought, this is great, we’ll go back when Liams about 8 months and try again… and we felt we had a great chance at being successful..

So November last year (2016) we flew back to Cape Town South Africa for a quick trip, did our embryo transfer with 2 amazing embryo’s, did a stop over in Singapore and flew home feeling very confident..

Our first day home, I did a pregnancy test and it was positive, by that afternoon I felt nauseous and sick and we said oh that’s great, a good sign.. by that night, I was very very sick with a really bad gastro and so was Liam.. I’m not sure how I managed to check on him during the night and care for him but I did .. that’s I guess what Mummy’s do xox  By the following morning, I was so sick and so was Liam that I said to Shane, you need to take us to hospital..

So he did and they gave me an IV, blood test and some anti nausea drugs… the bloods came back with a positive pregnancy result and through how sick I felt, I was happy… we went home and rested and then poor Shane got it..

Days later we did another pregnancy test and the HCG came back as higher, not hugely but higher.. then the next one was the heartbreaking one.. the one where the Dr asks you to come and see them, you know it’s bad when they don’t just tell you your results on the phone..  our HCG had fallen to 25 and we were miscarrying… and we were  heartbroken

As I write this, I have to stop and take a break as it still hurts so much…

Determined me, I contacted my gyno and booked in that night to see him and see what to do next.. he sadly told us that there was no coming back from that HCG and we were definitely miscarrying.. so we did a hysterocopy the following day, I stopped my hormones and along came the bleed and the tears…

Then I picked myself up and said we’ve got one more embie and two morula’s lets go back as soon as we can and transfer them..

So back we went in February 2017,  this time no renovating (yes we painted our house and redid our floorboards before we left), no stress (yep there was lots of that prior to the last trip) and plenty of time there to rest and relax…

We all got colds in Cape Town, Liam was quite sick but we rested and pretty much did nothing for most of the trip.

This time we flew there direct with Qantas as the last trip, Singapore Airlines again had issues with their plane and we had to fight to get on another flight to SA, but we traveled for over 40 plus hours to get from Sydney to Cape Town via Bangkok and Dubai and lots of stress…  (our first trip our Singapore airlines flight home was delayed for over 10 hours, we had to sit in the departure lounge with no food as others took more than they needed and left none for the rest of us, awful tea and coffee and then when we got on the plane, we sat on the tarmac for 2 hours while they fixed an issue with the cargo door and then we only got fed once on the flight as the food spoiled and they didn’t factor that in.. argghh it was awful both times.. so Qantas it is from now on.. or Emirates… lol..

We got home and sadly a BFN… we were devastated..  but sadly the embryo we had didn’t defrost well and the 2 morula’s didn’t develop… we were devastated..

We had also found out we couldn’t use our original egg donor as there were issues with her ability to be an egg donor so we were devastated and even more so when we had transferred all our remaining embryo’s 🙁

We are truly grateful for our amazing little boy and felt that we maybe should be happy and accept that this is our family but we also just felt we weren’t quite ready to give up yet on a sibling for him..

So yep we are going back one more time in May with a new egg donor and a new cycle and hopefully a sibling for our wonderful little boy xox