Friday, April 1, 2011

The options...

Immediately after learning our problem, I wanted to know statistics for everything: having a child naturally, chances of an abnormal child, what would be wrong with the child. The genetic counselor couldn't give me the answers as exactly as I wanted them. She instead said she would send our information to a genetic counselor in NYC that specializes in statistics and get back with me. 
I'm a logical person and looking at our odds I was figuring a 50/50 chance of naturally having a healthy pregnancy. Meaning 50% of the time I would miscarry or have an abnormal child. I did not like the odds I was laying out for myself, but I am not a geneticist. After a week or so wait she called to give me actual statistics, she had received from the NYC geneticist. It was said we have a 60ish% chance of conceiving naturally. And only a 1% chance of carrying an abnormal pregnancy to term and still no answers as to what would be wrong with the child. They believe I will miscarry almost every time if the baby is abnormal. So the four options they gave us are:
1) Naturally--which just means we keep trying and we are bound to have multiple miscarriages along the way.
2) egg/sperm donation- to eliminate the chromosome translocation.- neither of us like this idea, we think our babies should be both ours or neither our ours, and we eliminated this option immediately.
3) IVF(in vitro fertilization)- this would benefit us because they would perform PGD(preimplantation genetic diagnosis) on our embryos before implanting, and only implant the embryos with normal chromosomes.
4)Adoption
I  will discuss IVF and adoption more in depth later. 

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