There Was a Californian Who Lived in a Shoe

So when I saw the story a few days ago about the woman giving birth to octuplets I was shocked and horrified. What kind of a doctor transfers that many embryos into a woman? Didn't someone explain to her the risk of packing that many fetuses into one uterus? How the hell is she going to support 8 babies? Children of such low birth weight face so many development challenges. Can you imagine the continuing cost of early childhood intervention therapy, etc?

As more details trickle out, the more angry and disgusted I've grown. She already had 6 kids--all from IVF and FET cycles--and lives with her parents. What. The. Fuck. This woman, Nadya Suleman, reminds me of those crazy ass people who hoard pets. She put her bizarre and selfish desire for more children ahead of their well-being and welfare. When you start adding special needs kids into the mix, things get extremely difficult. She has no spouse or partner to rely on and apparently no income since she is, by all accounts, a professional student.

How is she going to support these kids? Can you imagine the cost of feeding and clothing 14 people? How about 14 doctor's visits and 14 trips to the dentist? What about the love and attention children so desperately crave? How can one woman provide all the love and support and guidance for 14 kids?

More importantly, who was the quack that continued to get this woman knocked up? People who aren't familiar with ART (assisted reproductive technologies) might not know this, but there are guidelines for embryo transfer in IVF and FET cycles. The goal of fertility treatment is to ensure the healthiest pregnancy possible. This is why women on injection cycles and IUI/IVF protocol are so closely monitored.

In an IUI, the patient injects hormones to stimulate follicle (egg) growth. When a sufficient number of follicles develop, the patient injects a trigger shot to encourage the ovary to release the eggs (which bodies like mine don't do since we make cysts instead.) Twenty-four hours or so later, the woman's uterus is flooded with washed sperm via a catheter. By placing the sperm within the uterus, it gives the little spermies a better chance of reaching that egg. The odds of multiples is higher in an IUI cylce because if, say, you had four follicles on the day you triggered, you might drop all four eggs. Maybe two of those will fertilize. Depending on your luck, you might get a set of twins and a singleton (triplets) or two sets of twins (quadruplets.) Some patients would likely choose not continue with the cycle. They'd let the cycle end naturally and make use of barrier methods when having sex.

IVF (which this woman used) is much more controlled. All the magic happens in the lab so the doctor controls how many embryos are placed into the uterus. For a woman under 35, the number is usually one, maybe two. For a woman over 35, the number might go as high as four in some cases but I've never heard of anything higher than three among friends who have undergone the procedure. There are exceptions of course. Someone like me, for instance, might get three embryos since I'm racing against the clock here. Since my uterus is so hostile (it's like Russia and Ukraine in there, appparently,) the likelihood of even one embryo squatting would be a friggin' miracle.

I really worry about this woman's mental health. Struggling to care for 14 kids, eight of them infants likely to suffer developmental delays and physical debilities, could very well break her. Also what about the effect of all those hormones on her body? She went through at least six IVF/FET cycles (4 singleton pregnancies, 1 set of twins, 1 set of 8.) That's assuming she got pregnant on the first cycle of each attempted pregnancy.

If you're not familiar with IVF, you might not realize just how many injections a woman will take in one cycle. It goes something like this:

Day 1-8: Lupron Injections
Day 9-15: Lupron and Follistim injections
Day 16: Lupron, Follistim, and HCG trigger
Day 19-Day 31: Progestrone injections until negative pregnancy test, positive means you keep up the shots until your progesterone levels are high enough to sustain pregnancy (could be weeks)

Let's say her first IVF was gangbusters and they were able to retrieve all the eggs she needed for all of her subsequent pregnancies. All those embryos sat on ice between pregnancies. When she was ready to get pregnant again, she'd go through FET (frozen embryo transfer) protocol. It's basically the same thing as IVF with the Lupron and progesterone injections but with estrogen injections or oral meds instead of the follicle stimulating hormone. Still, though, it's a ton of hormones.

Another thing that bothers me about this case is how easily she became pregnant through IVF. Seriously, of all the hundreds of women I've met through my support group very few have been able to conceive twice through IVF/FET. Her infertility issue seemed to be fallopian tube blockage but that's usually an easy fix with surgery. I know loads of ladies who had an HSG and cleared up that problem right there on the table. They never had a problem again. So I'm sort of curious about this woman's infertility.

And the cost of IVF! How the hell did she afford (at the very least) six cycles of IVF/FET? We've looked into IVF and it's ungodly expensive. For one cycle of meds and monitoring and lab fees and procedures, we're looking at $15,000 at the low end of the spectrum because our insurance won't cover any of it. For $15,000 (or a little more,) we can adopt a baby through an ABC program or hop over to China, Ethiopia or a handful of Southeast Asian countries for a baby. Gee, let's see. Take a gamble that an IVF cycle would work or go with a sure thing?

I think that's what annoys me the most about this story. This woman professes to love children so much but she apparently never considered adoption. Then again, she's sounds like a complete nutjob so I can't imagine any social worker approving her homestudy. I don't know. It's just a sad, sick mess.