Thursday, April 23, 2009

Just Call Me "Octomom 2" -- Or Not

As I may have mentioned, the third round of intrauterine insemination (IUI, otherwise known as Ai Yi Yi!) failed. So now we're embarking on IVF, otherwise known as creating a sister or brother for Snookums in a test tube.

My sister, who's a labor and delivery nurse, asked me how many embryos my doctor was going to "transfer" (this is a euphemism for how many fertilized eggs are they going to stick inside me).

"Oh, I don't know . . . Seven?" I said, uncertainly.

A few days later, she called me back in a panic.

"I'm really concerned about the fact that you're having seven embryos transferred," she said. "A lot of obstetricians I work with think this is totally unethical! Have you thought about the fact that you'll probably have to have a reduction?" (That's a euphemism for aborting the extra embryos so that you don't end up like Octomom.)

So the next time I saw my doctor, I asked, "How many embryos did you say you were going to transfer?"

"There's no upper limit," he said. "It depends on how well they do in the lab. For someone your age I usually transfer three or four. The most I've transferred is six, and that was for a friend of mine who's now pregnant with a singleton."

So that was a relief. But in the course of all this, I made the mistake of Googling my doctor, Mitchell Essig. Should I be upset about this clipping I found?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

No it was Peter Sarosi who was responsible for that! Dr Essig had nothing to do with that and no longer works with Dr Sarosi.

Joan Novark said...

If you click on the link to the clipping I mentioned, the article says that Essig was the one who personally delivered the baby boy to the Steinbergs. I also think it's a little less than coincidental that they named him Mitchell, which is Dr. Essig's name.

Drew said...

The whole thing is nuts about transferring embryos. When I was pregnant, and I knew about my kids ending up in drug rehab, then I would totally have been like "GET THESE THINGS OUTTA ME!"