Our Trip to India

Our first trip to India, in November 2008, was a crazy one, and the most stressful 6 days of my life. Despite all the planning and researching we had done beforehand, stepping foot in a foreign country and foreign culture to make a baby with the help and trust of strangers was overwhelming. We had a zillion questions whe had to ask again, and we had to review all of the decisions we had made up until that point to make sure that we had come to the right decisions with regard to choosing the egg donor, surrogate, and clinical staff, and that we were really ready for an end to our quiet, care-free life.

There were many, many tense "do you still want to do this? do you?" conversations over the 6 days we were there -- up until the moment of no return, and maybe even for a few hours afterwards. In the end, we really had to pick up our feet and jump off the cliff! A difficult challenge for anyone, not just two cautious, conservative Virgos.

And did I mention that there was a major international terrorist event while we were in Mumbai? We had been in the Taj hotel, scene of one of the hostage stand-offs, just the day before it happened, but left to go to a beach-side yoga resort early the next morning. With no TV or newspapers, and most of the other yogis there speaking to each other in German, we didn't hear about the terrorist event for more than 24 hours. Our families, however, had heard all about it, and didn't have the faintest idea where we were. They sent e-mails to every yoga center in the entire state that we were in (a state where you thow a ruppee and hit a yoga center) and were busily figuring out how they were going to identify our bodies. We were finally able to contact them early Friday morning to let them know we were OK.

So our whirlwind trip to India came to an end with a bang, not a whimper, and we had some medical distractions of our own when we returned to the US. Before we even had gotten completely over our jet-lag, we had a call from our doctors telling us that we were pregnant!