Dating and Surrogacy, Part III

It's a funny thing to make the decision to break up with someone you love and who makes you happy. Oddly enough, this is something I've done twice in my life - once with a girlfriend who lived 3500 miles away, and second with Hotshot, just before I began my surrogacy.

We tease each other a lot about who broke up with whom, each accusing the other of leaving us helpless and heart broken -- but we both know it was mutual. We were afraid, and I think wisely so, to drag a fledgeling relationship through such unknown territory. So we called it quits, and each did our own thing for a while.

Four months later I was two months pregnant when we decided that maybe this pregnancy thing wasn't such a big deal after all. That's not to say the time apart was in vain - when we got back together we were closer and more confident in our love than we'd ever been before. We knew we weren't together because of momentum or because we'd taken the path of least resistance, but because we really, truly wanted to be.

LABOR

Over the past few months, I've occasionally gotten nervous messages from nice people who follow this blog: "hey, you disappeared, assume you had the baby, how is everything?", "How are you? I've missed your posts lately. Did you deliver yet?" I'm very sorry if I alarmed anyone, or caused them to conclude that I was scarred by giving birth to a breech hedgehog and experiencing intense surrogacy remorse. The truth is I've just had better things to do with my new freedom :D

The short of it is: on August 16th, my uterus tried to kill the baby. The doctors stepped in with a last minute c-section and saved the day! Winchester and Wolfram now have a lovely little girl (if I do say so myself!) no worse for wear, and I recovered quite swiftly.

The long version goes something like this:

Q: I'm considering volunteering for a family member, and it would be my first. Like you, I don't want children any time soon. Were you able to find resources about the possibility of losing your own fertility? I truly think I would be okay with it, but I obviously have no way of knowing for sure.

Hi there! Thanks so much for asking this question. I had frankly no idea how to answer this, so I asked for the help of Certified Nurse Midwife Colleen Kennedy, who was kind enough to offer her expertise! She writes:

As a Certified Nurse Midwife I think about only two things when it comes to fertility - age and underlying issues that cause infertility.  With that in mind, when I first heard that there was a question about future fertility when a woman chooses to be a surrogate for her first pregnancy I thought there wasn’t a whole lot tying the two together.  However, upon further thought and research these are the issues that could come up if surrogacy was chosen for your first pregnancy.

Calling all surrogates!

Hi there!

I was wondering if you'd be so kind as to share with me stories of your hospital stay after the birth. Did the doctors put the baby on your chest right away? Did it stay in your room? Could you leave the hospital before the baby (please tell me yes!)? Where did the IPs keep themselves? Is there anything you think went really well or badly? Or, if you haven't given birth yet, what are your plans?

Cuz let me tell you: the idea of sharing a room with an infant is exhausting enough on my best days, but when I've just been through something as intense labor... eeks!!

- The Deputy