I'm not sure where to start tonight...first of all I cannot even begin to say what the support of texts, calls, and facebook messages meant to us today! We had huge highs and huge lows all in the last 12 hours. I actually had lots of tears even at times I didn't know what the tears were about.
We literally started with an appointment at 7:30am  and got back to the hotel at 6:30pm. There were lots of other couples in the waiting room from all walks of life. There were even people that have flown in from other countries because this is the clinic with the highest success rate in the country.  We feel so fortunate that we are this close to it. We had hoped to do the embryo transfer by June but doesn't look like that will happen that quickly. We did all sorts of testing today on Mark and I..then they drew blood to test for any genetic diseases. We met with a counselor and both got psychiatric evaluations to determine if we were strong enough to go through with all of this. I found out that Ehlers Danlos, the genetic disease that I have is found on the 9th chromosome. Also that Mark and I don't have to both be a carrier for us to pass it on, as it is one of 400 possible genetic diseases. One parent having the chromosome abnormality gives the child a 50 percent chance of having it as well.  We have the option to have the embryos tested for Ehlers Danlos and that gene removed. Of course that is like everything else involved in this very costly but worth it to us. There are a lot of hard decisions that we hadn't realized before today. We will need to do a lot of praying. Unfortunately insurance does not cover anything..absolutely nothing but we knew that going in. The next step is to bring our surrogate Nikki to Denver for her work up. We are really excited for that step and getting to spend more time with her. Once her evaluations are done we can start planning for the egg retrieval and embryo implanting. Because of our age they usually implant 2 embryos. Nikki and I will both have to go on hormones. Mine to stimulate egg production and Nikki to make her body believe it is pregnant already. They said that my hormones sometimes make people sick and pretty unbalanced. Mark is not looking forward to this time haha. I will take injections and Nikki will have a patch. I know that this feeling of being so overwhelmed with tasks and questions will pass as everything gets closer. For the egg retrieval we will have to be in Denver for 7 to 10 days before Nikki has to come. We will then have to stay a couple more days with her. I hope any of this post made sense as I feel like there are a million things going through my head. Still trying to make sense of all of it myself. I just can't wait to get farther along in everything. I know in my heart that things will go the way they are supposed to go. God has his hand in this. We are so lucky for the opportunity and to have met Nikki.