Documents to sign

The IVF process is known to cause a big strain on the health, mind, and even finances, but generally people don't think of the documents one signs during this process and how taxing that can be to the mind as well. Today we sat with a folder full of such documents. Firstly, we had to decide if we want to know the gender of the embryos or want to transfer only the embryos of a certain sex. We decided not to find out the gender, a healthy embryo would be sufficient. Secondly, we had to read all the information about the process and basically learn how many ways it can go wrong. For every statistics I read, I was reading between the lines to see the failure rate. Like for a 70% chance of success, you actually have a 30% chance of failure and that is also quite significant. Once a person goes through a miscarriage, you learn to sense that the rates for failure is not just a number, it is you!

The most miserable part was deciding what would happen to the embryos in the case of my death, or my husband's, or both of us. Also, if we divorce or separate, then too, what would happen to the frozen embryos. Coming from a culture where people do not want to create their wills thinking that will expedite them towards death, you can understand how cringeworthy signing these documents can be. 

I could not even check the "I agree" box like I do for software installations, without reading anything. I actually had to discuss the points with my husband and make sure we are agreeing before signing. So the whole process went through my brain, my pretty imaginative brain. Then I fell back to the ancient Indian (Hindu) text of Upanishad, that keeps telling us that we are truly neither the body, nor the mind. However much inflated our egos may be, because we think we are intelligent or good looking, none of it is actually us. So I kept repeating "not my body, not my soul" and signed the papers. Well, not really, I also had a good laugh with my husband thinking of all the weird cases they have written down which may cause them to lose the embryos. Those included earthquakes,  tornadoes, situations from their nitrogen tanks malfunctioning to something close to apocalypse!!

Not sure how I would keep sane, especially after going through so many phone calls to clinics, genetic carrier screening, reading up about cryopreservation, and knowing everything that can go wrong - from failure to retrieve eggs, not having enough mature eggs, not fertilizing, not growing the embryos, failing to implant, failing to carry to term, having babies with low birth weight, having not normal babies, and even leading to me getting uterine or breast cancer. It does cause a heavy feeling on the mind. Because you remember all the friends and family having chubby, healthy kids who are growing up to be healthy toddlers, going to school and all stuff. 

I told my husband, if later I ever complain about "mom guilt", he should just remind me that I went through an IVF (and subsequent ones too, most likely). For now, I should keep repeating "it just needs one reason to work" and stop myself from thinking too much.