CanadianCindyB

October 15th is National Pregnancy Loss and Remembrance Day. We are coming up on October 24th, which is what would have/could have been the 1st birthday of our son Kyle.  He died at Toronto Sick Kids last November from an E. Coli infection while waiting for a liver transplant, which was to be the treatment for a genetic metabolic disorder called Ornithine Transcarbamylase Deficiency aka OTC Deficiency. It's an extremely difficult genetic situation to manage with drugs until the point of transplant. But the doctors were hopeful. They were willing to try everything   possible for us. It was the very first time that Sick Kids was dealing with a case where it was known before birth that a liver transplant would be needed.  In order to have him on the transplant list immediately after birth and to help search for a living liver donor, we found out his blood type before being born, through the extra sample of amniotic fluid during the pregnancy.  There were high risk pregnancy speci

This past Saturday, the Globe and Mail newspaper had an article regarding PGD - pre implantation genetic diagnosis.  I plan on writing more about that topic in the future, but in the meantime, one of the statistics that was in the article was that approximately 1% of the live births in Canada were conceived via IVF - in vitro fertilization.  The 1% quote is pretty close.  In 2009, there were 380 863 births in Canada , and 3160 of these were via IVF based on the statistics stated below.  This is an overall rate of  0.83% of births were via IVF, which can easily be rounded up to state approximately 1%. I know a number of people who have used IVF in order to get pregnant, but I had never considered the overall percentage before.  I'd share one of cute pictures of friends children who have been conceived by IVF, but even for those who are open about the conception, it feels a little too public to request permission to use a picture. One in one hundred children being born ar