Modern Medical Miracles

Australia doesn’t have a Thanksgiving type tradition, but it is nice to stop and think of some of the things I’m thankful for.  A really big area for me is medical science for many reasons.

Image by Sven Teschke, Germany

As a baby my husband had pyloric stenosis, where the lower opening of the stomach doesn’t open to let food into the intestines.  It causes projectile vomiting and must be treated surgically or it leads to severe dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, malnutrition and can be life threatening.  He was born 50 years ago and there were no good anaesthetics for babies, so at 6 weeks old he was strapped to a cross and put into ice for his operation.  It was successful and all he has to show for the experience is a very impressive scar, I suppose they were  worried about being quick rather than neat.  I’m very thankful that even in such conditions they could and did operate, and also that progress means today’s babies and parents don’t have to go through that.

Forty-three years later when he met me we wanted to have children but it wasn’t possible naturally.  So another modern medical miracle came to our rescue – IVF.  And to throw more letters in there, we used ICSI and FET.  This is a form of in-vitro fertilisation (the IVF) where a single sperm is injected directly into the egg instead of letting them fight it out (Intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection).  Luckily or unluckily I respond really well to the various hormones used and produced lots of eggs, but it put me at risk of ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome (just for fun it’s OHSS) and wasn’t allowed to transfer fresh embryos.  So we had to wait for another cycle and do a frozen embryo transfer (FET).  This is an amazing process – the fertilised eggs are grown for two days until they have 4-8 cells, then are carefully frozen until you are ready to unfreeze and insert them.  I’ve heard of embryos growing successfully into a child over a decade later, although mine only had to wait a couple of years.  It did take a few attempts but we got our first perfect little girl.

Even in the short time before we went back for another go things had changed and after a couple of unsuccessful transfers with two day embryos it was suggested that we grow our remaining embryos to the blastocyst stage.  At the time the two techniques had similar success rates overall (this may have changed in the last couple of years) but implanting blastocysts had a higher chance of a pregnancy.  If that sounds confusing what it means is that we had 5 remaining embryos and we were implanting one at a time because we didn’t want twins, so if there was only one embryo that was going to grow it could take 5 transfers to find it.  When we unfroze them all it did turn out that only one managed to make a proper blastocyst, one only divided a couple of times and three attempted blastocysts but didn’t really make it.  Of course we transferred the blastocyst and now have our second perfect little girl.

It has some interesting consequences – in one sense our girls are twins because they were conceived at the same time.  We have the most amazing photos for the album even better than an early ultrasound, we can’t be certain which embryo became the big girl but the little one was a text-book perfect sphere of cells.  The big girl has asked a couple of times in that preschooler way ‘Why was I born first?’  And I can flippantly answer ‘Because you came out of the freezer first.’   There’s a tiny frisson when you have that inevitable parent moment of thinking ‘You can’t possibly be MY kid!’  Which is even more hilarious because they most certainly are – the little one is a mini-me and the big girl is completely her father.

So top of my list of things to be thankful for is modern medicine – without it my family would not exist.

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