Hello All! Welcome to The Casto Family blog. We created this blog to keep family and friends updated on what is going on currently. I will try my best to update this every few weeks or so, but make no promises =o).
As a few (or most of you) may already know, Adam and I decided about 2 years ago that we wanted to start growing our family, but not with animals, we have enough of those =o). We decided we wanted to add some little ones of the human variety =o). We thought that starting a family was going to be a breeze, not much to it, right? But it turned out to be such a crazy emotional rollercoaster that is still has not ended, but we are hopeful it will soon.
Things started really rough. We had 3 miscarriages before finding out that I have a genetic disorder called a ‘Balanced Translocation’. We did a bunch of research and talked with a specialist to try to get a grasp of what this was and what it meant for us. Basically two pieces of my 1st and 3rd chromosomes broke off and switched places. This typically results in loss of the pregnancy, births with issues or defects, or Down Syndrome, etc., depending on the break points. The genetic specialist explained that my breakpoints seem to be in places that affect development and that since the pieces that broke off and switched places were large, rather than small, that my pregnancies would most likely result in miscarriage due to the baby being unable to develop rather than live births with issues or defects. There are not tons of statistics out there in relation to your odds of having a baby when you have a Balanced Translocation because there are so many different chromosomes and so many different break points, that it is hard to find two alike in order to get much statistics. She thought that we would have around a 24% chance of getting a balanced viable egg and suggested we do In-Vitro Fertilization in order to maximize our odds and hopefully get a few good eggs rather than continuing to try and having miscarriage after miscarriage until we managed to find a viable egg.
We took her advice and went to go see Dr. Vaughn at Texas Fertility Center. Dr. Vaughn was so sweet and knowledgeable. He guided us through the whole IVF process and took great care of us. At the end of the whole IVF cycle, we ended up getting about 14 or 16 fertilized eggs, which is a great number, so we were excited thinking that we may get a few ‘Balanced’ eggs and be 2 happy campers and maybe not even have to go thru IVF again. But when it came down to it we got the dreaded call from Dr. Vaughn telling me that all of my eggs retrieved were unbalanced =o(. No matter how much I tried to prepare myself for this possibility, it still felt like I got hit by a brick wall, the news was devastating. I never imagined that something we were so passionate about and put so much time and effort into would end so quickly and dramatically =o(.
Once we got over the shock of the situation, we went back to TFC to talk about our options and where we could go from here. Dr. Vaughn explained to us that we could try IVF again if that is what we wanted, but he explained that medically speaking, our chances were pretty high that we would have the same results. We talked about it and decided that our best route to go from here was to use an anonymous egg donor. This would provide us much more hope of getting a good viable egg through this next round of IVF since none of my eggs are balanced. We went back and forth for a while debating about how and if we wanted to tell everyone about our situation. As you can tell, we decided that full disclosure would be the best for not only us, but for our future children. We will love our children to death regardless of how they were created, and do not want them to ever feel like we are keeping something from them or feel any shame about how they were created. I will be our babies’ Mother either way, whether they like it or not! =o) He He. We plan to undergo our next IVF cycle within the next month or so, and are very hopeful and excited to take what we hope to be the first step toward the end of our long, long journey to start our family. We are ready for a new journey =o), a baby one!
These past 2 years have been stressful in so many ways, but it truly feels good to talk about it and fill our friends and family in on what is going on. I do not know what we would do without your love and support through the good times and the bad. We will keep you updated as the process continues . . . .
