Thank you to all of you again for your continued support and messages.  Know that we are checking this blog religiously and appreciate each note that comes along.  We have also had many visitors who have stopped by to hang out, have a glass of wine, or help with house decorating.  Those visits have really helped and we appreciate all of you that have taken the time to do that. We are very lucky and blessed.

I’m going to scoop Meaghan and provide some news: It was confirmed yesterday that there are 17 (yes, seventeen) fertilized embryos freezing on our behalf at UCSF.  Of the 37(!) eggs removed from Meaghan, a bountiful 17 were mature eggs of which all took to the fertilization (cue me taking a bow).  I don’t think we’ll end up with 17 children (upset alert!), so down the road likely some will be donated for research or to someone in need, if we decide that’s the path we want to go.  I did some quick math and determined that if we had 17 kids, it would cost somewhere around $795 million dollars (rounded) to send them all to college.  But considering they would have somewhere around 50% (again, quick math) of their DNA coming from Meaghan they have good odds of getting scholarships so I may have to get back to my abacus and recalculate.  Either way…17 kids?  Holy crap.    Forget octomom, how about seventeenomom?  I know Meaghan and I dreamed of being the subject of a reality show…

We also have a schedule in place for Meaghan’s treatments.  She has an echocardiogram tomorrow morning (Tuesday) to get a baseline of her heart function.   Friday morning is the PET-CT to get a full picture of her body to see what’s going on in there.  Then, chemo teaching class on Tuesday, followed by her first chemo treatment on Thursday September 6th.  While that seems like a lot, it actually fells kind of nice to not have 3-4 appointments every day.  We’ll make sure Meaghan is getting plenty of rest to meet things head on come the first infusion.

I second Meaghan’s thoughts on the choice on the oncologist.  While it was incredibly difficult to have to choose between the opinions of so many smart people, it was good to know that each of them expect Meaghan to be cured.  I was somewhat hoping that one or two of the doctors would be duds to make the choice easy, but we were fortunate to see many talented doctors who each would have been a fine choice.  We are lucky to be in a place where that type of cutting edge care is readily available.  Now that Meaghan has made a great decision, we can move forward and get after this thing.

Meaghan hinted a bit about our morning on Saturday.  We arrived at the fertility center at 6:45am and went straight into pre-surgery prep which involved meeting the fertility doctor and the anesthesiologist

Tangent: I am going to be even more unbeatable at Scrabble and spelling bees by the end of this.   This medical terminology is a gold mine for complicated words.

After the IV was started (2nd attempt), then carted Meaghan into the procedure room.  Then,  they sent me off to wait for someone I never met to call my name, hand me a cup, and escort me to the sample room, or in this case Room J182.  I tried not to make eye contact with the poor lab tech (worst job ever for 7am on Saturday?) as she explained the rules which were basically “put something in that cup, and then press the button for me to come back and collect it.”  Ok, got it.   At this point, I considered starting a blog post that said something like “Coming to you live from Room J182…it’s live play-by-play action of…”  I quickly decided that plan or some type of live Tweeting may have been perceived as uncouth, so I instead focused my attention on familiarizing myself with my surroundings. It took about .00002 seconds for me to realize that I was NOT going to touch ANYTHING in that room, especially the creepy loveseat, the DVD collection, or the mulitple remote controls.  Now mind you, this did not stop me from taking some photos with my phone of the various DVD titles available and giggling like a 12 year old for about a minute.  I would list some of the movie titles here, but I want to keep this a safe place for all to enjoy (but happy to text photos to anyone who is curious).  I then spent the next minute pondering what an appropriate amount of time for me to be hanging out in RoomJ182 could be, and then decided to just get on with it and be done.

I’ll spare the details (bullet dodged for all of you) and move on to the part where I was then brought back to find Meaghan waking up from the procedure to ask me “How many did they get? (I assumed she meant eggs)” and “Tell me what you just did”.   Then as I was about to launch into my story, she fell back asleep and I started looking for a nurse to talk to.  Shockingly, they all declined.

As Meaghan mentioned she had a bit of a reaction to the narcotics used to knock her out so we ended up spending a bit more time in recovery as she got some better anti-nausea drugs and started to come back around.  All in all, she handled it like a champ, and harvested more than 2x more eggs than the woman who came in after us.  Final score, Meaghan 37, Nice russian woman who flew in from Moscow to donate eggs to her friend 17.  No easy chore at all, but as we have all come to expect Meaghan did great.

On to the kitten. In a drastic understatement, I wouldn’t call myself a cat person, but I knew what I was getting myself into with Meaghan. Frankly, I’m shocked we made it this long without one.  It took somewhere between negative 2 and negative 5 seconds for me to be relegated to #3 most important mammal in the house.  Whiz (his name him until someone comes up with a better one – we live right next to a place called Whiz Burger, hence the inspiration behind my suggestion) was immediately given my bathroom as his new cat condo. Simultaneously, I was given strict instructions on how I was supposed to interact with the cat, which I loosely translated to “Don’t look him in the eye.  He’s my cat and will soon replace you.”  So we have some room for growth on the whole MPC-Whiz relationship.

Tangent:  I was also thinking about applying some of these new medical words to the name of the cat:  “Ganorelix!  Get in here and eat your cat food or I’ll feed it to Meaghan!”  or  “Menopur…stop being a weirdo…that’s the 50th time today you looked at yourself in the mirror and then ran behind the toilet!”

It’s also been great to have Meaghan’s parents in town to help provide support and assist us with getting the house put together. They have always been overly generous with us, and this past week has been no exception.  Art is now getting onto walls and decorating is in full swing.  Surgical procedures, cats, framing art, and decorating….can a weekend get any better?  I submit that it could, but we’ll go with what we have.

More to come…thanks again for all of the support.

mpc