I remarked to Katie months ago that I am positive this will eventually work out for us. I have always been very optimistic and hopeful and have felt very good about this. I also remarked that, as much as everything would work out, everything that could possibly go wrong would first. And it has. 😉

Now, however, everything seems to finally be working out. Here’s the update so far, for those who haven’t seen facebook.

We are incredibly excited and have nothing but good news so far. The procedure was an utter (if fairly painful) success! We found over 35 viable sperm and 24 eggs survived thawing. After thawing, 14 eggs became fertilized and we are now waiting on the final count for embryos. On average, this means (hopefully) about 10 viable embryos will be ours!!! Fingers crossed. We’ll have a final count this weekend.

It has been such an incredibly long journey with so much discouragement and many problems.

As we near the close of this phase of our Journey, I am looking back over the steps and memories and what it took to get us here.

If I were to list all of the things we had to do to make this happen, the financial cost, the physical toll, the emotional strain… It’s a little staggering. Here is a summary:

For over a year, I have been taking nightly shots to stimulate creation of sperm. These shots are not only a pain and inconvenient, there are some not-so-enjoyable side effects. Hormones have been fluctuating like crazy.. I’ve been up and down emotionally, cranky, tired, aggressive, and so on. My belly has been tender and bruised from the shots, and even my nipples have been incredibly tender and sore. Yep, I’m man enough to admit it…

Then there’s the cost… These shots alone have been roughly the amount of an additional mortgage payment for us every month for over a year. Then, just when we thought things were finally moving forward, they had to INCREASE my dosage for another 3 months… This is also after the cost of the IVF itself, all of Katie’s medications and all of the tests, all of my procedures (multiple PESA/TESE’s and analyses) and so forth. We’re into this about double what we set out to spend and have, only through the incredible blessings from our Father in Heaven, in the form of all of our AMAZING friends and family and ward, barely made it to where we are now.

Did I mention the physical toll? I’m sure Katie could put together he very own post about her side of things, so I’ll simply stick to mine. The TESE procedure is not fun, and I had it twice. Thinking that was bad enough, I readily signed up to have the stupid things LITERALLY cut in half. I’m still recovering from this one.

Add to that all stress and debilitating depression and fearing the unknown future. Even now that everything is finally working, so many things could still go wrong.

Anyway, I seriously didn’t write this post to complain or garner further sympathy. We are incredibly optimistic. That’s not what this is about. My point is that, after all of this (plus all of Katie’s stress, pain, etc), the only thing I can think about right now is this: