Perspective

I like to know the odds of things.

I always have.

For example, did you know that the highest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev(1707-1782) of Shuya, Russia? Between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 confinements, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets. 67 of them survived infancy.

Want to know the odds of that happening?

1 in 20,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000*

When we were going through infertility, all I wanted to do was stay in the majority.

80% of the time, 12+ eggs are retrieved for my age group.
90% of the time, at least half of those result in hatching blasts.
71% of the time, completing a fresh transfer with 2 hatching blasts resulted in pregnancy.

Many of you know that OHSS resulted in having to freeze our embryos, and complete the frozen transfer two months later.

The odds were 40% that one would implant.

I belonged to an online forum with many other women going through IVF. Before we started the FET process, I was bemoaning my odds being significantly lower than going through a fresh transfer.

"Your odds are not really 40%," one user said. "They are only 100% or 0%. There is no such thing as 40% of a baby."

The truth is that I would not take a plane tomorrow if it had a 99% odds of crashing.

But in all of this, I have to remember that God doesn't play the odds. In His sovereignty, every last bit of this is planned.

Whether my odds are 99% or 50% or 1%, God knows the outcome already and isn't surprised or constricted by overwhelming odds.

Even had this pregnancy been perfect, it doesn't guarantee me a baby at the end of this. I have read countless stories of women delivering stillborns at 40 weeks. No explanation, no reason. (The odds are 1 in 116, in case you're wondering).

I am not trying to sound cynical, but through this I realize that death can happen to anyone, regardless of odds or facts or figures.

No guarantees.

As cliche as it sounds, this situation has forced me to take each day as it comes, never relying on tomorrow as a certainty.



Psalm 139:16 All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

*http://www.mothersdaycelebration.com/mothers-day-trivia.html