Twin Boys!

Simon Thomas Evans and Jack Henry Evans were born today (November 5th, 2012) at 10:45 pm (Mumbai time). The surrogate began going into labor the doctors performed a C-section. The babies are 32 weeks old, or 8 weeks early. The doctor says they are healthy and crying well! Here are their first pictures.

Injections, injections, and more injections

A major part of the process to retrieve Anna's eggs involves lots of hormone injections. According to Anna, being able to get 23 hormone injections from her husband has been the BEST part of her trip to India. All of the spent needles are below.

Here's the results schedule/results of everything in India.

The Gandhi Museum

This is where Gandhi lived and worked in Mumbai. Truly inspirational!

If only we could all share this perspective, wherever we are. This statement, sadly, will always be relevant.

Sanjay Gandhi National Park

Field Trip! These kids were really cute, they were so excited to get their picture taken. When I was a kid the coolest field trip I had was a 2 hour drive to the natural history museum. In India they have an almost vulgar amount of ancient relics they get to see just minutes from the city.

We caught a van to the park and I was in the back with these girls and they kept taking pictures of me and giggling, so I took a picture of them too. They gave me spicy apple slices and played some awesome Indian music. Our driver kept honking and then screeched to a halt and there was a huge monkey sitting in the middle of the road.

There were monkeys everywhere. Before we came I told Eric I really wanted to see a monkey. We must have seen a couple dozen. There were monkeys jumping up and down and figthing on top of the bathroom I was in. We also saw a monkey jump out of a tree and take a candy bar out of a girl's hand. We informed not to eat around the monkeys because they were all too comfortable around humans.

There were dozens of residences for Buddhist monks carved out of the side of the mountain like this one.

Eric standing next to one of two thirty foot statues of Buddha at the entrance of the Kanheri Caves. This Buddha dates back to the sixth century AD. The park has a total of 109 caves dating back to the first century BC, pretty amazing!

Bombay!

We spent today as tourists and had a chance to see the main area of Mumbai. We took the train from the Santra Cruz station to Churchgate. We bought first class tickets and still were packed in like sardines. The trains in Mumbai are segregated into two classes and there are women-only coaches. Anna was the only woman in the first class coach. Here are a few pictures of the train ride in Mumbai.

The University of Mumbai.

 Do pictures of cows in downtown ever get old?

 Prince of Wales Museum

 The cricket fields near Churchgate

 The beach in Mumbai

Day 1

I think anyone that's been to a big city feels a bit overwhelmed by its size and all of the people. Mumbai is no different. While driving around it appears that every possible square inch of road is occupied with some type of vehicle (taxis, motorcycles, and auto rikshaws). Lane lines are basically worthless or nonexistent as a two lane road easily becomes a four lane road. Crossing the street is like playing Frogger on crack. There is no such thing in as a break in traffic or crosswalks for pedestrians.

For our first day in Mumbai, our surrogacy agency arranged a driver to get us to our appointments. Our first stop was with Dr Meenakshi at the Yashoda Infertility and Healthcare Services Clinic. This is no small scale operation. Dr Meenakshi has delivered nearly 200 babies via surrogate in the last seven years! This month alone she has more than ten babies due. Here's the line-up of the a few surrogate mothers (I think?). The surrogate mothers are given the option to live above the clinic. They receive proper nutrition and have regular appointments with the doctor.

After our meeting with Dr. Meenakshi, we were directed to the Sunrise Clinic (on the other side of the city) to get a sonogram and meet with the gynecologist. Anna's initial sonogram showed that she had nine eggs in each ovary. That's a good sign! We were then instructed on how to do the Gonal hormone injections. Apparently the hormones are designed to mature the eggs for harvest. Of course, it will be my privilege to give Anna hormone injections for at least the next 5 days.

Also, in case anyone is wondering if we'll be having a boy or a girl, it lawfully has to remain unknown.  Here's a shot of the sign in the clinic.

Forward to: Hotel Midland, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

During our two weeks in Mumbai, we'll be staying at the Hotel Midland in the Santa Cruz neighboorhood. The hotel advertises itself as a "luxury 2 star" hotel. Our room is small, but clean and quiet (except for the occasional airplane flyover). Luckily, we're on the third floor on the back of the hotel, away from the noisy street. The room also comes with a great breakfast on their rooftop terrace (eggs, toast, juice, and a wild card Indian sidedish).

The Plan

Here's a rough itinerary of our first trip to India:
1. Meet with Dr Meenakshi to discuss a treatment plan to extract Anna's eggs
2. Meet with potential surrogate mothers
3. In-vitro fertilization with our embryos into the surrogate mother
4. Be tourists

Seems pretty simple right? Hopefully, everything should proceed as planned. The timeline is a bit fuzzy, but it appears that Anna will be taking some hormone injections for a few days, followed by a sonogram to examine the quality/quantity of her eggs.

(Halfway) Around the World

We left Seattle at the break of dawn on Saturday (02/11/2012).  What could be more beautiful than Mount Rainier at sunrise? 

Our flight to India took about 26 hours, which means that we arrived late Sunday evening. I think it's an understatement to say that the 15 hour flight between Newark and Mumbai was long. Amazingly, it's only the 20th longest non-stop flight (per Wikipedia) currently in service. At least the airline didn't charge for meal and movies.

History

I suppose our decision to consider surrogacy as an option is similar to many others who have faced infertility. We were unable to have any (more) children on our own and we desperately wanted more and needed help.

My wife had an emergency hysterectomy a week after the birth of our daughter in 2008. She was 24 years old. As a distraught husband in the emergency room waiting area, I can still hear our doctor’s first few words after the completion of the surgery. “We left her ovaries, so you guys can still do surrogacy if you want.” At the time, I hardly gave the suggestion any consideration.  I had a newborn baby and a wife who had undergone a serious and difficult surgery. 

After a year or so, my wife and I began talking about number 2. There was never a question in our mind about having more than one child. We talked briefly of surrogacy but dismissed it quickly. Frankly, it just seemed too weird and prohibitively expensive. We were determined to adopt, believing that it was the selfless thing to do.  Soon we had had a home study completed, signed up with several adoption agencies, spammed our friends with “Help us adopt” emails, and created several postings in newspapers. Over the course of a year, we were considered as potential adoptive parents on four separate occasions. Each time, the birth mother changed her mind or the child went to a different couple.  By the fourth rejection, we were emotionally spent and determined to take a different path.  We began to set our sights on a different path.  Surrogacy.

After significant research we decided that pursuing a gestational surrogacy in India would be our best option. There were several factors influencing our decision to do this. Of course, a major contributing factor to our decision was the cost difference. A surrogate birth in Indian compared with places in California is nearly a third the cost.

The purpose of my blog is to share the experience we had (are having) with surrogacy in India.