Thursday 26 April 2012

Creatinine Chart

I think you should be able to click on this and make it bigger in another window.
Before I bore some of you senseless over internet discoveries regarding reproduction, let's remember what brought us here in the first place - Kidnification.

I just wanted to draw your perhaps wandering attention to the little slide in results that's happened recently. That slide has happened over the past 3 months, and it's still sliding. 150 points is where I need to be to be able to produce that vomit for that horrible doctor lady I met. 120 is where I started. You might say I'm feeling a little proud/hopeful/excited/impatient at the moment while I wait for another month to pass.

Seriously. Where do images like this come from?
Remember that Creatinine rises with a curvy line on a graph so that a slight rise when you're at 120 means a lot more than a rise (or fall) of 10 when you're up where I am.

Remember too that I was up at way over 300 when I presented myself to my GP in 2009 with a headache before my transplant.

Lastly, remember that kidney health doesn't just mean time-consuming things like kids, but also time saving for whosoever might be the generous Donor No.2.

Little Miss K is a lot like Heather here. Proud as Punch.

Monday 23 April 2012

The pitfalls of surrogacy – Look before you jump


No-one else is writing about it, so I’m stepping up to the plate. Turns out that official advice on surrogacy is something that is a dangerous game. Defy anyone to mess with a money making business after all.

I’m not saying that I’m suddenly a nun. I just had my eyes opened to the realities of a fast growing demand on a deregulated market. Add to that the complexities of my dearest country, India, with massive poverty, a douse of corruption and a lot of discrimination and things get a little messy.

Look before you jump.
Children born to surrogates in India are paperless. They’re stateless. They have no citizenship. You have to apply for that citizenship, creating that child’s existence on a blank piece of paper. I suppose in a similar way to the process of creating that child’s existence in a petri dish that you did nine months earlier.

If the surrogate mother is married, you have to acquire permission to parent the child that was born to her and her husband, despite the fact that the child’s made from your genes. You acquire permission and then you apply for a passport. Thus rack up the months. 

If the surrogate mother is not married, you’re on to an easier ride. But don’t get too comfortable. Remember your context.
Money makes the world go around
Clinics in India are making a fair whack through this sudden infertility escape route. Of the $23,000 you pay for your child (or, as the Embassy told me “they quite often come in twins. I should warn you”), only $1000 goes to the mother. Do with that what you will.

The rest of the money is swallowed by the clinic.  These clinics are businesses, and they have ways of squeezing more profits. It does seem a coincidence that many of the blogs out there hear of the children being born at 7.5 months, instead of 9. An earlier birth makes for a faster recycle of the mother, and a higher pay per month for that woman than if they waited the full term. A more vulnerable pre-term baby needing medical attention can put pressure on a faster turn around of papers in Embassies too.

Are the clinics telling the truth when they say the mother’s not married? One Immigration officer noticed that the name of a surrogate mother on the exit visa of one happy couple with their new child was the same name as had been on an exit visa used just 5 weeks earlier. If you’re not sure, and the Embassy’s not sure, your waiting time just increased a few more months again.
Back to healthy basics
Lastly, remember your values and live by them, despite whatever yearnings you may have. We’re all humans. These women are taking a health risk for your sake and because, no doubt, they need the money.

Where do the surrogate mothers live? What are the conditions like? If six appear to be living at the same address, it’s likely they’re not being housed anywhere as the clinic says and are probably just sloping home, possibly to a slum.  If the moral argument’s not doing it for you here, think of the future health prospects of your newborn. It can get murky.

FACT: 30% of the papers that are put into the British Embassy in Delhi for citizenship of surrogate children are fraudulent. 

BUT Surrogacy can be a smooth process if you've done the right research  
Follow your nouse
  • Ask questions. Visit the clinic. 
  • Ask to meet the mother. 
  • Ask to see where she lives. 
  • Ask about the conditions. 
  • Ask if you can get proof of marital status. 
  • Ask fellow clients how smooth the process was. If it took them 12-14 weeks and not 1000 questions, likely the clinic they went through is known by the Embassy and the papers they produce are legal.  If it took much longer, think again. 
  • Ask how many children the mother has had. Surrogacy’s been a phenomenon there for 2-3 years, and women can only have 5 children by surrogacy by law in India in their lifetime. Think of how many births they’ve been through, what it’s done to their body and if there are any implications there for the medical supervision your clinic is offering them
  • Read this page of guidance from the British Embassy in India
And then, then, you decide whether to take the plunge or not. 

Thursday 5 April 2012

To reproduce, or take another's produce. That is my current question


Looks like living in France might be spicing things up, legally speaking. I’ve mentioned that this country has particularly strict views on the issue of surrogacy.  Should have figured, what with the Mary figures brightening up churches in every arrondissement around. Not that inclined to go into it too much on this forum.

Thinking about it anyways, it's not as though Mary went down the traditional route anyway! What has she got to say about the matter!? Ruddy hyprocrits. (please don't spam me).

The US passport my husband so conveniently holds also doesn’t turn out to be all that exciting either unless we also had proof that we’d lived in the US for the past five years.  So we are left with 3-6 months wait in India for a UK passport for a kid post birth. I've actually used my 'contacts' and am now in email conversation with someone at the Consulate in Delhi. Remarkable how odd connections can come in handy when you least expect it.

Hmm. Why can't I just build a womb out of some whale blubber and chewing gum and grow a baby in my spare bedroom. I could feed it peanuts and apple juice.

Back to choices of clinics and stomachs, though, Delhi seems to have higher success rates than Mumbai at 75% chance of pregnancy the first time around, 97% the second. (I need that poker lady's advice again...). Indeed, in Delhi, you can spend a smidgeon more and have eggs put in two surrogates at the same time – a sort of explosion of our Genetic DNA out for the picking. It’s highly likely we’d get ‘Twiblings’ - a sort of Tweedleme and Tweedleyou - but I guess that might not be a bad thing. At least we wouldn’t have to go through this all again. Chapter of bizarre online searching over for once and for all. Issue of infertility shelved forever. Back to being Traditional Nuclear Family, normal but for our dark secret etc...

Putting all my energies into this does two things. Firstly I get carried away and think I could move heaven and earth. I could easily convince myself I had Jesus tendencies. What the service provides is, after all, a Mary like conception. But secondly, it does scare me when I step back and realise that this the online world i've suddenly become a global expert is also something that I have a choice about. Oh yeah. Forgot about that.

With a clinic lined up, a Consul General considering the legal loopholes for me and a few Indian ladies answering my every email 10 minutes after I send them, it’s decision time. To take the plunge or not to take the plunge. To reproduce, or to take another's produce.

Ca c’est la Uber question.