Seeking where God Leads

Yesterday was embryo transfer day. Sadly, we received a call yesterday morning from the embryologist telling us that the last of our embryos had stopped developing. It is so hard to comprehend how we went from having twice as many embryos as last time to none on transfer day. It has been a very heartwrenching week for both us. After talking to the doctor yesterday afternoon, it seems that it will not be possible for us to have our own biological children.

Over the past couple of months, we have been thinking and praying about embryo adoption. When we started losing our embryos this week, we decided to pursue this option. We had looked at some profiles for some donor embryos about a month ago, but did not feel a strong pull towards adopting them yet. This week some new embryos became available and after reading through the profiles, they seemed to be a very good match for us. When we still had one embryo left, we decided that we would transfer the adopted embryos along with our remaining embryo.

By mid afternoon, things looked very poor. We had lost our last embryo and the three donor embryos had not survived the thaw. Richard and I began to feel lost and hurt, wondering why God was saying no to us. About 1:30 pm a second vial of the donor embryos were thawed and all seemed to be doing well. At least one of them was thriving and recovering from the thaw very well. The other two were responding and seemed the would also make it. About 3:30 pm we transferred three adopted embryos into my womb where we hope that at least one of them will attach and grow.

While we are mourning the loss of the opportunity to have children naturally, we are also thrilled at the prospect of becoming parents to these dear little ones that were left behind. It is a gift from God.

We continue to ask for your prayers as we potentially embark on a brand new journey in our lives. I am home on bedrest right now and it will be at least a week or so before we can test to find out if we are pregnant.

What an adventure is ahead of us!

IVF Update

Our egg retrieval was last Friday and things looked really good. Here are the basics:

• 9 eggs were retrieved and 7 of those were mature.
• 6 of the 7 actually fertilized
• On Day two, 3 of those eggs stopped growing. The three remaining eggs were progressing, two of them were below average quality and one looked to be good quality.
• On day three we have two below average embryos that are 8-cell and 5 cell. They should be a 6-8 cell embryo on day three. The third embryo that was our good one was still a 2 cell and the embryologist said it may not continue to day four.

Everything looked so good into egg retrieval...our best cycle numbers yet, but today we don't even know if these embyos will make it to transfer at all.

We are trying to understand what God is doing here and what direction he wants us to take. We certainly continue to ask for your prayers...

Episode III: A Schunke Hope

Wow! Time has flown since my last post. School started which is probably all I need to say to explain why I have not posted in a while. Classes are going well though, I have some great kids this year. The days just fly by though! It is busy!!

Despite our past IVF failure, we decided to try another cycle. We are just not ready to give up yet! We started IVF #3 the first week of september. I was very worried about going through a cycle while in school. Surprisingly, it was much easier than I thought it would be. I think it has been a blessing in disquise. I have been so busy, I don't have time to worry about my numbers and think about how cruddy the medicine makes me feel. I have just been plugging away, trying to put my energy into my kids in school and let God take care of the rest. We have been praying and hoping as always and waiting to see what God is going to do!

So far things are going great! We just gave the HcG shot which induces ovulation. Here is where we stand less than 35 hours before egg retrieval. Today during the ultrasound, we measured 13 follicles! They all looked really good. Most of them were betwen 17 and 20 mm which is great. One was a little small, and will probably not be ready by Friday, but that is still 12 potential eggs. My estrogen levels look fabulous too. They hope for 200 per mature follicle. We have never hit that, until now! My levels today were 2432, so we are looking great!

Our egg retrieval is scheduled for Friday morning at 7:00 am so we will be up bright and early.

Please pray for this procedure for us. The last retrieval was really rough on both of us between the pain and trauma of the procedure and the loss of 50% of our eggs right off the bat. We feel really good that things are going to go much better this time...we appreciate you agreeing in prayer with us on this issue.

This past week, I have seen God's love in so many ways. There are two things that really spoke to me this week. All summer I was really into potting plants for around the house and outside on the porch. It became a kind of therapy for me. I rescued plants on the clearance rack at the home and garden stores and grew them into beautiful plants again. I thought if I cannot grow babies right now, at least I can grow plants! Well, I had two planters with Mexican heather on the front porch. On a really hot day, that got absolutely parched after I was not able to water them the night before. Over the next couple of days, one whole side just turned brown and died. That was about a month ago. The other day I decided to cut the dried off branched out of the planter so that it would look better. I was very surprised to find that on all the dead stems, new growth had started and was flourishing! I was totally surprised! I also have a cyclomen that I rescued from Wal-mart's clearance rack. It had flowered a little when I bought it and then quit. Over a month ago, the leaves started to yellow and die. I read about them on the internet and found out that when that happens most people just through them out because they rarely flower again. They grow from a tuber and if they yellow, some say you can let the dry out and then plant them again in the spring and they might flower. Well, just as I was ready to think about drying it out, it stopped turning yellow. Stayed green. So I decided to keep watering it for a while and it has been green and beautiful. This week, lo and behold, it started blooming again...in the beginning of fall!!! I just think these are little love notes from God, showing how His power is made awesome through weakness.