What does it look like to manage challenges with miscarriage, breastfeeding and family trauma? Amy's birth story, Part I

In today's episode I speak with a woman who talks about her experience:
* growing her family as part of a same sex couple
* her experience with miscarriage and how that changed the way she approached her next pregnancy
* issues with breastfeeding when her supply didn't match her newborn's demand
* problems with thawed and refrozen sperm
* and IUI surprise (not common for same sex couples)  

 What follows is the first part or our conversation., 

Transcript

Paulette  0:00  
Music. Welcome to what you didn't expect, infertility, pregnancy and birth, how we think and feel about this enormous transition often lives in the gap between what we expected and what we actually experienced. This gap exists in part because of how we tend to talk about and portray these events of all kinds of media in a one dimensional way, everything was amazing, but it's more often the case that there are beautiful things that happen and at the same time really challenging things that happen. This show shows true experiences, both the easy parts and the difficult parts, and how we manage what we didn't expect, the intense things that can happen in the course of this transition can impact how you see yourself, how you see your partner and how you parent. The better we understand what happened to us, the better we can manage all the things that follow. I'm your host, Paulette Kamenecka, a writer and an economist and a mother of two girls, and I met many, many challenges in this process, none of which I expected. In today's episode, I speak with a woman who talks about her experience growing her family as part of a same sex couple. She shares her experience with miscarriage, how that changed the way she approached her next pregnancy, and what turns out to be her IUI surprise. She also shares how she managed breastfeeding when it didn't originally go to plan. What follows is the first part of our conversation. Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you tell us your name and where you're from?

Amy  1:25  
My name is Amy Porter. I live in Alberta, Canada. Oh, wow,

Paulette  1:30  
nice. So Amy, thanks for coming on the show. Why don't you tell us about your journey to have a child? Well, it's

Amy  1:38  
a little bit different for us. I am a queer mom of two, so my wife and I definitely didn't get pregnant the traditional way. I went through all of the same fertility testing as in fertile couples. We went through a fertility clinic. It was actually pretty funny. I had to go in for the uterine dye tests and all of that same stuff, just to make sure all the plumbing was still working. And I went in for that, and the doctor with me, and said, Oh, so you and your partner are having troubles conceived. And he said, Yeah, my wife has an alarmingly low sperm count.

Paulette  2:10  
Do you take that in the spirit of which it wasn't tended? Yes,

Amy  2:13  
he did. They thought it was very funny. And then the technician, who is behind the glass was laughing her her gut. So it was really good.

Paulette  2:21  
Okay, good, good. So I did that stuff too, because we had trouble getting pregnant. It's not super pleasant. Yeah. I

Amy  2:27  
mean, it never hurts just to make sure everything's working. I'm a fairly anxious person to begin with, so having at least the prior knowledge that everything was working as it should be, it made it seem to me that it's worthwhile and that if something does go wrong, it's not physically me that's wrong, it's just the regular chances of getting pregnancy or getting pregnant, that's the issue.

Paulette  2:51  
And so do you immediately start off with IVF? No. IVF

Amy  2:55  
is really expensive, yeah, because my issue had nothing to do with how my body works. It was just a lack of semen. We decided to do intrauterine insemination, yeah, so we got donor sperm, and then I ended up going on some fertility drugs. So I was on clomid, yeah, which is basically reverse birth control. Gives you a big ovulation. And then I went in the next day, and they take a very long, perky base, or, if you will, and they drop it off right on the doorstep of your fallopian food in

Paulette  3:31  
the US. I am told that you'll get a lot of choice about picking sperm. And I've interviewed people in Spain where they said the doctor chooses you get to say what color hair you want, or what eye colors that it sort of matches the look of your family, but that's about it. What's it like in Canada? Well, the

Amy  3:47  
problem is, is that Canada in general has really low donation, in general, for eggs, surrogacy, sperm donor, organ donation, blood donation, because there's no financial incentive. So a lot of times for couples who are looking to get pregnant using donor sperm, we typically purchase from the US, oh, okay, and things are shipped over. It's kind of like online dating, where you go into the sperm bank and then you can click in all the information that you want for your donor and then pick from the number of profiles that they have there.

Paulette  4:22  
Okay, so it sounds like more choice than Spain, maybe closer to the US, yeah, yeah. And then how was that? Did the first one work? Yeah? So right

Amy  4:32  
off the bat, we picked the donor that we liked. The only thing I wanted was blue eyes, because everybody in my family has blue eyes and then a clean bill of health, yeah. So those were our biggest concerns. The donor that we chose wrote an essay for the kids saying, This is who I am. Don't be afraid to go out there and try new things. And it was important to me to have an open ID donor so that if my children decide that they want to contact them, that this person is open to that possibility. And it showed to me that they really understood the impact of their choice, which I really appreciated for me getting pregnant. I did get pregnant right off the bat, but I learned pretty quickly at about 11 weeks, at one in four people's pregnancy and it's a miscarriage. So we lost our first one. I bled for about a month afterwards, wow,

Paulette  5:21  
that. Let's go a little bit slowly here. That's really hard. 11 weeks is pretty far along. Yeah, it's

Amy  5:27  
it's hard to figure out exactly how far along I was or when baby stopped progressing, just because I think I had the very first scan at six weeks. So there was a little flipper there, as far as we can tell. But I mean, baby can pass any time, and in that range of time, I see what you're saying. You never know, right? My body could have been holding on to it for however long, but yeah, it was, it was a bit of a shock for us. And thankfully, my body at least knows what's going on. And I was very quick to to have this miscarriage and to get baby out. It happened over the period of six hours. For the most part, I went to the hospital, and by the end of the night, I was done. So it's just waiting for your body to repair after that. Yeah, go in for the next ride.

Paulette  6:19  
Yeah. And then do you have to wait a certain amount of time, or what if they tell you

Amy  6:22  
the fertility clinic wanted me to have two or three regular cycles before I went back in, yeah? So once that that amount of time had passed, it was just on the cusp of six months afterward.

Paulette  6:33  
Okay? And then was it a second one successful? Yeah,

Amy  6:37  
second one was successful. I got pregnant on that try and that's my eldest, Frankie. Oh, wow, nice.

Paulette  6:44  
Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  6:45  
she's four years old. Okay, so

Paulette  6:47  
let's, let's talk about that. What was the pregnancy like?

Amy  6:50  
It was pretty normal. Everything kind of went smooth sailing. I was definitely farcious than I was before. Now, knowing that pregnancy can end not the way that you expect it to. Let

Paulette  7:03  
me ask one question, Did you walk into pregnancy with certain ideas about what it would look like or what it would feel like?

Amy  7:08  
I guess we all kind of do, right? You see so many pregnant people walking around, and it seems like it should be a fairly easy thing to do, yeah, and especially while I was waiting for my body to heal after the miscarriage, I was really angry that my body was not doing what I thought it should. And so you're constantly worried in your next pregnancy, oh, what's going to happen is today, the day. And so we ended up purchasing the little mini Doppler, yeah. And then on my really anxious days, I'd go home and I'd listen to her heartbeat, and I'm like, okay, everything's all right, we're good. And I

Paulette  7:45  
think it would be useful to know what the real numbers are for miscarriage, because my guess is it's higher than one in four, and it's a girly lesson in your lack of control,

Amy  7:55  
right? Yeah, it's kind of been a theme throughout, everything. Yeah, everything was pretty normal, and I delivered naturally. Had pooped in utero. She was about a week late, so we had the NICU team there and ready. But I mean, once it was time to push, she was out within a half hour. If

Paulette  8:15  
you were a week late, do you have contractions that day, or how the Panasonic go, and are you with a midwife, or what's going on in Canada?

Amy  8:23  
I went through the hospital just because I don't trust that everything's okay at this point anymore, and I definitely want to be where the best support is. If any of us were to go into crisis, yeah, I had woken up in the middle of the night, at like midnight, and I had started having contractions, and my wife was asleep. Okay, did

Paulette  8:43  
you know it was contractions?

Amy  8:44  
I started timing them, okay? And after about an hour, I was like, Okay, these are very regular. This is the real thing, especially since she was a light like, this better be the real thing. I'm gonna have to escort her out myself. So I woke her up an hour later, and she was like, Okay, I guess this is happening. So she said, all the books, or whatever it says online says, so take a shower, because you're not sure when you're going to have that next so I went, and I took a shower at one o'clock in the morning, and when I came out, my water broke. Oh, wow, like a Hollywood break. No, it was just a slow drip. But I mean, wearing anything was not going to happen because everything was leaking everywhere. So instead of using those hospital pads we had purchased depends at a time, I wore adult diapers to the hospital. Because I was like, at least I'll feel confident in walking around. So when I arrived at the hospital, they're like, oh, so your water broke. How's that looking? I said, Well, here's this. And they took a look, and it was green. So okay, that's not a normal color. We need to put you on monitors and get baby out. So I went on to post, and yeah, shortly after that, she arrived. I think I started posting at seven o'clock in the morning, six or seven, and she was out by quarter after 10. And that was intense, or that was fine, or it was pretty intense. My birth plan is always get the baby out safely with the least amount of pain possible. So I asked for an epidural. I seem to be a special person where the epidural only works on half of my body, so the left side I was completely numb. Right side, I could feel everything. At this point, I was six centimeters dilated, and so they had completely repositioned the epidural. And then after that, everything finally worked, but I was so numb I couldn't even lift my left leg. My wife had to hold my leg up the entire time, like, Okay, it's time to push, push when you feel a contraction. But I couldn't feel anything at all, so I had to physically push my belly with my hands to wow, have her come out.

Paulette  10:53  
Yeah, that sounds tricky. I interviewed an anesthesiologist, and her description of getting that epidural in makes it sound like magic. It is a tiny space that they're shooting for, so it's very hard to it's very hard to find it and and I've definitely heard people say it only worked on half of my body. And she had said that's it's in the wrong place, right? And that every single person is different when it comes to anesthesia, and you will only know kind of where your level is, once you try it, which sounds like that's your experience, right? They did it on half. They tried again. They overkill the left side. Can't

Amy  11:27  
do anything, yeah. I mean, they tried so hard to get work for me. But, you know, after three bushes of epidural, whatever medicine they had, my leg was numb and I was still hurting on the other side. So they actually have to put it into a different vertebrate, what I understand. And after that, it worked, and I had a good nap.

Paulette  11:47  
Oh, good, yeah, yeah, since you since the day started at midnight, right? Yeah. And it sounds like the labor was relatively chosen. Yeah,

Amy  11:57  
my family has a proclivity for making children with very small heads, very dull, like babies and so,

Paulette  12:05  
well done.

Amy  12:06  
Thank you. I thought that was the right choice for us. My wife has a very large head, so we're like, well, let's use our brains here and definitely go with the smaller two. And yeah, it was pretty easy after that, I had a slight tear, but that was stitched up right after. Were

Paulette  12:23  
you imagining breastfeeding? And

Amy  12:25  
did you try that? I did try breastfeeding. We tried for about three and a half weeks. I have a very large supply, and my daughter, even now, at a time she does not appreciate having too much food in her mouth, so this was a problem for us. Every feeding ended up with both of us crying, and we both hated it. So I started pumping just to express myself and have that relief, and I felt like she was still getting breast milk. My wife was able to feed her in the middle of the night in the long run, and I clearly have why to go for it. So my cousin had a Medela, and she was very gracious and lended to me, and I exclusively have coffee with her for about 11 months. Oh, wow, yeah, and then we wean her, and that was what we ended up doing for her. That sounds like a good middle ground, yeah, as soon as I switched to pumping a lot of my anxiety and feeling awful and really frustrated with everything went away. It helped my mental health a lot just to have that pressure off.

Paulette  13:43  
Yeah, breastfeeding seems like a tricky thing because it's natural, which I think a lot of people equate to easy. Those two things are not synonymous, right? It's absolutely not. And there are so many elements not only your body, it's your baby, and they have no action, right? How much food she wants in her room?

Amy  14:03  
Yeah, that's exactly it. And, I mean, there's a lot of pressure to do what's natural, but considering that my wife and I get pregnant naturally, we were pretty open to doing whatever it worked for our family.

Paulette  14:16  
Yeah, that sounds perfect. And how old is Frankie now? Did you say she's four? Oh, nice, four. Such a fun age.

Amy  14:23  
Yes, she's big into dinosaurs, and she was telling me how she was incubating her eggs today. So that's

Paulette  14:29  
cute. Yeah. And so how long before the second one comes along?

Amy  14:34  
We had a lot of trauma happen after that. So my wife lost four family members in the span of nine months. Oh, my God, my daughter was six months old. My wife actually found her mother deceased in her home, which was an awful experience. And then three days after that, her grandmother passed. And then three months after that, her grandmother passed, her cancer. Three months after that, her grandmother passed. So it was parenting in crisis, learning how to cope with all of these big feelings while dealing with a small female who can't control their own feelings. Yeah, it was really hard, but we made it through that. Sounds like way too much on the menu there. It was a lot. Dealing with multiple estates was definitely a challenge while still parenting. And in Canada, I get a whole year of maternity leave, so I was grateful at least that I had that year to to go to all of these funerals. I can't imagine trying to take that much time off of work for all of these deaths. But we we continued at it, and by the end of it, all we were we looked at each other and we said, you know, seeing all of this death and realizing that one day we ourselves are going to die, who is going to be there to support our daughter? She's an only child. Do we want that for her when we're gone. Having a second child was definitely something that we wanted, but it was also a big part for her, so that she has someone in her corner. Yeah.

Paulette  16:14  
Do you know the grandparents get to meet Frankie? We Well, you're right.

Amy  16:21  
Yeah, it was, it was hard, because the grandmother who passed of cancer, she was in very late stages of cancer, so she wasn't entirely lucid. Yeah, we went to go visit her. We could tell she was in a lot of pain, but we were very grateful that we had that opportunity to introduce her, introduce them to each other, yeah? And have that moment so that we're like, Okay, everybody, at least has has met each other, yeah? And we knew that they had a love for each other, and it meant a lot to us, and we were able to say the goodbyes that we all didn't have the opportunity to have unexpectedly. Yeah, yeah.

Paulette  17:01  
Good Lord, that's a hard year. A new baby alone is a hard year, right? Yes. Okay, so you've just established yourselves as unbelievably tough, and you're going to have a second one. So how do you space that?

Amy  17:13  
It takes some time to go through the fertility clinic, depending on when you get on the wait list, it can be six months before you hear that. So I think she was somewhere around two and a half when we put our names on the fertility clinic list again our city, because the wait time was far less. But now that we have a child, we can move all of our sperm to our city. In the meantime, we had found some donor siblings, and we have connected with them, and we find out through the grapevine to all of them that are not going through the city anymore. And if you wanted to have more public available, otherwise you might not get any. So we had a total of three sperm units shipped to our facility here in Edmonton, and somehow they don't know what happened. I got a call from the from the fertility clinic, and they said you're probably wondering where the medical director is contacting you I am now. And they said, well, the long and short of it is that we think everything's okay. That's not a great way to lead a conversation. And we weren't trying to hide anything. We were doing testing, trying to figure out what happened? We don't exactly have the answer, but all three of your sperm units got during transport. That's $3,000 they refroze all of them into instead of having three large samples, they refroze straws. I don't really know how that works, but that they did, and what the motility looked great. There were lots there. Everything looked great. But, I mean, sorry if any vegetarians out there, if you take a steak, you put it in the freezer and get thaw it, and then you go, I'm gonna have it later, put it back in. We all know that that food is not going to be at all the same quality it was the personality put

Paulette  19:24  
it in. Yeah. So often the details are very important to this process. But generally speaking, it's possible to refreeze thawed sperm for IVF, although the process can affect sperm quality, studies have shown that sperm can survive multiple freeze thaw cycles, but each cycle tends to reduce motility and viability. For instance, research indicates that sperm can retain the ability to fertilize after up to three freeze thaw cycles, making them suitable for procedures like exceed and assisted reproductive technology programs, but the percentage of modal sperm decreases subsequent refreeze cycle, which could impact the success rates on IVF.

Amy  20:07  
They asked that I try with those refrozen units. They weren't at all liable, because you have to sign liability waivers whenever you transport anything like that. So we had waived all of the rights and everything, so we were kind of left on the hook. But thankfully they said, Well, if it doesn't help, have two new units shipped to you, which my wife found in Ontario, so half the country went so they were on hold in a sperm bank in case these refrozen ones were garbage, which they were good sperm samples should have somewhere around 5 million swimmers and good motility. Our size 200,000 and a motility is 10% Wow, yeah. So very fancy water was injected in there, and obviously it did not work. So we have units shipped.

Paulette  21:03  
Is the new units? The same source? Yes, we

Amy  21:05  
have a finding two of the same donor in Ontario, which we were very grateful for. We ensured that they arrived still frozen. And in the meantime, my cycle was completely thrown off because I was so stressed out. My cycles were 40 days plus long. They doubled my hormone dosage, which is really fun for you know, controlling their own emotions. We went in for the second try, once everything kind of calmed itself down and was predictable again, and I did not get pregnant. Okay, we have one trilateral at this point. I had been on hormone treatments from my daughter to now for about eight cycles, and I think up to 12 is what's recommended, because after that, it increases your risk for ovarian cancer.

Paulette  21:57  
So Good Lord, how to stack on the pressure?

Amy  22:00  
Yeah, I looked at my wife, and I said, Okay, I don't think I want to keep trying after this. If we don't get pregnant, are we okay, just only having one child? So we talked about it, you know what? It'll be a lot easier only having one kid, and it'll be cheaper. We can go on bigger vacation. I mean, she's already potty trained, she's late for the night. It'll be fine. Yeah, one kid will be all right. So we decided to do our last try, mostly some of that we didn't have the cryo storage, and I ended up getting pregnant. So, I mean, it's the closest thing to a surprise pregnancy a lesbian couple,

Paulette  22:37  
no kidding. So obviously you get a call from the lab, that's where you find out I

Amy  22:42  
took a pregnancy test at home, and the two lines showed up and I like, Sam, we're pregnant. She goes, No, you're not. Actually, I am so late December of 2019 I had my seven week scan and we could see little babies, heart flicker, and they're like, only one baby, thank goodness, I don't want to in there. So yeah, one little heartbeat. We went, well,

Paulette  23:14  
that's amazing. And I hadn't occurred to me when we corresponded before. So you were pregnant during covid? Oh, yes, wow. So walk us through that. So obviously your partner doesn't get to come all the exams I was doing, it was

Amy  23:28  
gradual. So by the time my province shut down, which was mid March of 2020, I was 18 weeks pregnant. I work in a daycare, so I was like, Well, I don't mind having an opportunity to kick my feet up and have some time off that. I mean, it shouldn't last too long, which we now know. Two weeks after that, I had my 20 week anatomy scan, and because it was so early in the pandemic, my wife and my daughter were still able to attend that appointment. So we all went together. We had a little boy growing in there. Oh, that's so exciting. And we were very thrilled. I thought for sure we were going to have a girl, but nope, it was a boy. And we left that appointment. And my biggest concern at that point is, what on earth are we going to name him? I have no boy names, and for us, finding a boy name was was really challenging. We took some time, and we ended up settling on the name Arturo. We're calling him Artie, for sure. That's cute. Yeah, we were pretty happy with that. After that all of the lockdowns, so all the appointments kind of came into place, and I went to my OB appointments, and my obstetrician was doing my regular measurements, and she said, your belly is measuring like, unusually large. Oh, really, yeah, you're measuring five weeks ahead.

Unknown Speaker  24:53  
Wow,

Amy  24:54  
yeah. So she said, I'm just gonna send you in for for an ultrasound, just to make sure everything's okay. This was and, okay, any opportunity to see the baby. I don't mind. I love going for ultrasounds. I always find it's really fun trying to figure out what it is that they're looking at. Yeah, a puzzle. And I'm, I'm a big research nerd, so yeah, I love to figure all that stuff out. Like I said I'm 28 weeks pregnant. I go into this ultrasound and everything is going well. Chances are something's wrong with my it'll be a fluid levels, something of that nature. And for a routine ultrasound where we should be looking at my fluid levels, we weren't looking at my fluid levels. She was spending time looking at his heart like an uncomfortably long time looking at his heart just clicking and zooming and changing the angles. And it went on for about 25 minutes. And I looked at her, and I said, Oh, we're really looking at his heart, huh? And she said, wiggly. I can't get the pictures that I want, but I could feel him that he was not wiggling. She left to go get the pictures verified, and she came back 20 minutes later, okay, you can go. So I left, and I got it to the car, and I looked at Sam, and I said, I think something's wrong with his heart. And she said, What do you mean? They spent a long time looking at his heart. And she said, Well, if something's wrong, then they'll call us. And they did. They called me that night, and he said, We need to go have an OB appointment as soon as possible tomorrow.

Paulette  26:44  
So your partner sounds very calm. We

Amy  26:47  
do a pretty good job of balancing each other. And given the fact that we had been through so much trauma before we we've learned a lot of coping mechanisms, and you learn pretty quick that life does not always go the way that you plan it to, and stressing about it and panicking doesn't change anything. Yeah,

Paulette  27:09  
although I'm imagining for you because you're the one who's pregnant, it feels a little different. Yeah, I

Amy  27:16  
was definitely in my own head for a number of reasons. Obviously, I wasn't sure what was going on. But I have two close friends who have children with heart issues. The one, her son, had two heart transplants before the age of four. Wow. You go, oh, I can't imagine somebody going through that and then being put in a position to go, what if that's me, right? Yeah, it's a scary frame of reference, for sure. My other friend, her son, discovered that we had multiple heart defects in Negro and we survived only briefly after birth. So heart transplant is on my mind and death is the opposite. Yeah, and I have no idea where my child may fit if it is his heart. Yeah. So your mind is spinning out of control with all of the possibilities that it could be. Was a challenge. Yeah? So we just watched endless movies. Well, sat on the bed and I she was happy as a clam my child, because, I mean, watching movies is great, and it gave me the opportunity to ruminate on everything, and probably myself calm while feeling like my role was about to spin out of control. Yeah. So I had to go to that appointment alone because of all the covid regulations. I walk into the room, and the doctor comes in and she says, I'm sorry, but it looks like your son has a very rare heart defect called transposition of the great arteries. Wow, that is a rare one. They said. Basically, what that means is that his arteries grew in backwards.

Paulette  28:58  
What is transposition of the great arteries. Usually blood that oxygen is received in the heart, sent in the lungs, where it picks up oxygen back to the heart and out to the body. With transposition of the great arteries, the arteries are switched, and they change blood flow, oxygen, poor blood now flows through the right side of the heart and back to the body without passing through the lungs. And oxygen enriched blood now flows through the left center. It goes directly back into the lungs without being pumped the rest of the body.

Amy  29:34  
And I didn't want one world to crumble around me. I feel and cope with stress, through research and information. I figure if I know a lot about it, then I can't be scared about it. Yeah. And so I looked at her and I said, what are his chances.

Amy  29:53  
She said, I don't know. I said, Okay, is it fixable. And she said, I don't know.

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