Where I was, where I am

As many of you are new here, I thought this would be a good time to give a bit of a re-cap.

At age 12, I was diagnosed with a bleeding disorder, von Willebrands disease. This diagnosis was made after I had my period for over 2 months and 3 birth control pills a day were not helping.

At age 20, I was diagnosed with PCOS.

Combine these two disorders, and you have a recipe for disaster in the menstruation department. For almost 20 years, I battled month's long periods, the longest being 6 months and 3.5 weeks. As you can imagine that gets really old really fast. There is not a hormone made that I have not taken, and not one of them worked for longer than a few months.

At 31, I had decided that I could no longer live like that. There was no way that I would ever be able to raise a child when I was wiped out half the time. I opted for an endometrial ablation, kind of like cauterizing your nose only with your uterus. As bad as I was suffering this was a decision that took me almost four years to make.

As an adopted child, with amazingly wonderful parents (HI MOM!!) I have understood for a long time that biology has nothing to do with making a family. My husband (Joe-Bob, which is not his real name) decided that my comfort and health trumped having a child. After the surgery, I began to research the best way to create our family. My main motivation for surrogacy was that I did not want to deprive my husband the chance to have his biological child, not that he ever said that this was important to him, but because I felt so much guilt about not being able to give him this child. He is the love of my life, we have been through hell and back together and I would walk through fire for him.

For over a year, I researched surrogacy as if someone had a gun to my head. We went to an agency thinking that this would be the best way for us to have a great experience. It turned out that we were very wrong, there were many hurt feelings and we almost just gave up. I began this blog because there was so little information from the prospective of the intended parent. My pain and hurt was so deep that there were days when I was unable to think about children, which meant that I spent a lot of time at home staring at the walls. I have always been prone to depression, and spent all of my teen years in such a deep depression that I forgot what it was like to be happy. Thankfully, I came out of this until I thought that all hope of ever having an infant was gone. All those feelings came back and I was scared out of my mind, this was a road that I had been down before and I knew where all the sinkholes were. I was standing right on the edge when I wrote this post. Little did I know that it would bring an amazing woman into my life, Sabrina has been just amazing. She e-mailed me and brought me into a support group that honestly saved my life, and gave me hope that I would become a mother. Months later, Sabrina agreed to be our surrogate, this amazing woman was going to help us create our family, to this day I only half believe how lucky we are.

Here we are.

• Our contracts are signed.
  
• We have our first clinic appointment.
  
• We are waiting on the genetic testing to see if we can do PGD on the embies, so that I can use my own eggs.
  
• Sometime in August or September, we should be transferring.
  
• We are just transferring ONE, because the idea of two at a time makes me want to hide in my closet.
  

Please feel free to ask me anything that you want. I LOVE questions, almost as much as I love comments. No question is stupid, I understand that this is something that most people do not know a lot about.

WELCOME!!!