Hi friends!
Sorry about the lack of blog posts last week, life has been super hectic these past 2 weeks! As I’m typing this, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open and it’s only 6.30pm – so please forgive any spelling errors etc. I thought I would finally update on our TTC plans seeing as I haven’t talked about it since around this time last year.
If you followed my pregnancy journey with Hunter, you will know it was difficult to get pregnant and then it was difficult to stay pregnant. At 20 weeks I was diagnosed with an incompetent cervix and had to have emergency surgery at 21 weeks to place a cerclage. Long story short, Hunter was born at just 33+6 weeks and spent 3 weeks in the NICU/SCN.
Fast forward to this time last year when we decided we were ready to have another baby. By this point I had done just about all the research I possibly could on an incompetent cervix and the options for a future pregnancy. My best option looked to be a TAC which is a Trans-abdominal Cerclage which is placed before you get pregnant – via a laparoscopy. So we went and saw a specialist Doctor in Brisbane to discuss my options. Long story short, I had an MRI and an internal and the doctor said my cervix was measuring 2.5cm which is half the length it should be when you aren’t pregnant. It is also far shorter than is safe during pregnancy. I would have absolutely no chance of carrying a pregnancy to term with my cervix that short and would struggle to even make it to viability, let alone to 28 weeks where bub would actually have a decent chance at life. So my only option would be to have the TAC placed. We went ahead and booked the surgery in for the following month, however, about 2 weeks before the surgery I called my doctor just to make sure this was the right decision – and he expressed his concerns of me living rurally during pregnancy and explained that he would constantly feel nervous during any pregnancy I have whilst I live here as we don’t have the best health care services locally (the closest hospital that can deliver premmie babies is 2 hours away and even then they don’t deliver before 32 weeks) and urged me to have money put aside in case I had to move into a city again. Due to this we decided to cancel the surgery until we had at least $10,000 saved up just for that.
About 8 months ago, Jamie and I looked into surrogacy – as I have so many issues falling pregnant and during pregnancy, we thought we’d explore all of our options. However, we came to discover how difficult and expensive it is to have a baby via surrogacy in Australia. Medicare does not cover any of the associated costs (IVF etc) and including legal fees and medical bills, we would need to have between 60k-100k put away for it. After a lot of discussions, we decided that seeing as we already have one amazing little man, it would be selfish and wasteful to spend that amount of money trying to have another baby – with no guarentee of it actually working.
So after a lot of conversations and thinking about what we want, we have decided not to have any more children. Now, if we have a “whoopsie” then obviously we will have another baby or if we miraculously win the lottery then we might consider surrogacy again. But in reality, its probably never going to happen for us. We are both content with our little family and I am focusing on my career and my studies for now.
I know that was super long-winded, but I wanted to explain how we came to our decision and the fact that there still is a very, very small chance that we may have another baby some day – but it’s not currently in our plans whatsoever.
If you’ve had complicated pregnancies, how do you feel about having more children? Or do you know someone who has been through surrogacy? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks for taking the time to read yet another long-winded blog! Your support is always appreciated.
I just wanted to sneak in here that I may have a super exciting announcement within the next few months. It’s all very new at the moment, however if everything goes to plan I will have something amazing to share with you all soon – so watch this space!
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!
Kimberly XO