On Wednesday, right when I got home from my blood draw for my progesterone test, Michael sat me down and well, brought the quest for children to a screeching halt for this cycle. As you may or may not know, Michael has a very painful condition called Ankylosing Spondylitis, its a type of auto immune disease. Well, it's been flaring up pretty badly lately and he has a pretty hard time moving around. Essentially his hip bone/pelvis is fusing to his spine, kind of limits his mobility. There is medication that slows the progression of the disease and in doing so really limits the pain. Unfortunately it is VERY expensive and with his funny student insurance we've had a hard time getting it for him on a regular basis. We've finally found a pharmacy that is going to work with us so we only have to pay a $75 copay per month, Rite Aid Rocks!!
We've also found out recently that quite a few of Michael's blood relatives have the genetic marker for the disease, and a few have developed the disease. The research he's done says that he has about a 50% chance of passing on the genetic marker and then if you have the genetic marker you have about a 20% chance of developing the disease. While that doesn't seem like to much of chance, the fact that so many of his relatives are suffering from it is scaring him, and honestly me as well. He was thinking that he didn't want to pass on this disease to any offspring. But he still wants children, so that leaves us with a couple of options. We can adopt or we can have children using a sperm donor.
Since, there is no reason I can't have children we are leaning towards the sperm donor option. So now we have start the research on how this all works. We've found a Cryobank that is located in the same building as my Dr. and there is even a donor that looks like he might be a good match, similar coloring & build to Michael. We thought about still trying to do the IUI this month, but we figured that would be too much stress for us to try and get everything together in time. So we are going to put it off until next month.
In the mean time there is so much to do! We both have to have all sorts of tests done, FDA regulations I guess, HIV, Hepatitis tests, I have to have a CMV antibody test. It's just crazy. Apparently CMV is a common virus similar to the Chicken Pox & Herpes virus's in that once you have it, the virus never really leaves your system. Many of the donor's are positive for the antibodies for the virus and if they are positive, then I must be to. If I'm not that limits our choices even more.
So much stuff to learn!
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