finding out I am an IVF baby.

 Read the previous post to get caught up to speed, but here are the cliffnotes:

• found out from my sister that she was donor-conceived, potentially an IVF baby
• she has a bunch of siblings and found out through 23andme
• She suspects that I am the same. 
• Everyone knew... 

Great, now you are caught up to speed. 

I decided to take a DNA test on New Year's (postal strike delayed our tests getting to us for quite a while) with 2 of my favourite people. Andy and Doug. We all spit into tubes and sent it off... I could barely wait, but while we did, all of our friends placed bets on how many potential siblings I might have. The highest guess being 69, the lowest guess being only 1 (Douglas,) which ended up being accurate according to the test. In fact, I found out that I was one of the first IVF babies in the province of Ontario out of the Life Clinic in Toronto. My parents paid $14,000 in 1983 to start the process for me. It seems wild to think about that dollar amount now. That is a down payment on a house... and they paid that for me. I know later on in life my mother would feel some semblance of buyer's remorse, but I will get to that. What the DNA test showed was that there was my sister, my cousins... but it didn't really reveal anything for me... what it did was let a rather large skeleton fall out of the closet... My results showed that my second cousin Michael is actually a first-half cousin. What that means is that his mom (who will not be named) is actually my aunt, rather than a cousin. This is something we had suspected for quite some time... because grandpa was a bit of a man whore and my great aunt was a bit of an idiot (one of my aunt's words, not mine) when I spoke to the family about this... no one, and I mean no one, was shocked. It also confirmed things in that my cousin (now aunt)'s brother looks identical to my grandpa. It was a huge source of discussion when he resurfaced to the family at a wedding, and we were all blown away. This is a huge secret, but it didn't reveal the secret I wanted to reveal so I went digging. I found a genetic cousin from Idaho and reached out. He is absolutely lovely and helped me to start mapping a family tree. I figured out that my Genetic Great Grandfather is Soloman Cavanaugh... Which gave me a jumping-off point to connect. I am honestly so grateful for John sending me in a direction. I took the time to dig a bit, but I found out that I am definitely of Scottish/Irish/ Germanic/ Nordic descent. No one should be shocked by this information because I am blonde-haired and blue-eyed with a fair complexion. It all fits for the stereotype coming from those countries. After all of the hype to get the test done and finding nothing, we all thought for a second that maybe, just maybe I am a musclow after all, but that was quickly dispelled after meeting John and finding out that my cousins had all taken the test to find out if we would match (the musclows are awesome). They all told me before we got our results that it really doesn't matter what the test says, we are family and that is that... it was shocking to find out that a bunch of them didn't know, considering I was told everyone knew, but small towns are funny like that. 

Having not been sated by those results, I contacted a therapist to get started on working through all of the anger and frustration and straight-up identity crisis I was going through. She helped and is continuing to help, as it is a lot to process. I also took another genetic test with Ancestry, hoping to get more answers. In the meantime being I went home quite a bit to try to rip through all of the places Mom would have hidden that information. One of the things I found out is that there was no regulatory board for IVF and sperm donation, samples were being used to create many, many children, and there were all sorts of doctors out there playing at god (there are so many documentaries on this). So as a result, the parents were advised that, as there were no laws surrounding this that it would be beneficial for my father to legally adopt my sister and I. it was done when my sister was born, and I wasn't old enough to remember, or so they thought... I do remember my parents going to a lawyer's office when I was little, but I honestly couldn't tell you anything about the conversation, just that the office had hideous brown carpet. So I went back a few times to search for things, only to come up short... my mother was a very tidy monster in this regard. She left nothing behind for us to use or start our search. That is when I had an idea, I reached out to my aunt Pat: my mother's last living executor of estate. I asked her if she would unseal mom's medical records after a consult with my family doctor. He told me he would be able to release whatever it was that my aunt requested. My aunt agreed that it was time that I know and so she marched down there and asked our family doctor to "give her everything" the prepared the files from what my former doctor left in his stead, and it was a very thin file. It didn't really speak to the IVF just that my mother was scheduled for a procedure, there was a discussion about egg retrieval and the fact that my father was tested and couldn't have children. My sister looked at the documents closely with me and she said that it would be possible for dad to father children, just a long shot... so that is why we had thought, okay maybe... but there wasn't alot to go on. We know the specialist my mother saw was Dr. Kroach out of Toronto, but carly had advised me that it was a dead end as they no longer have the records. It meant that I had to wait for Ancestry test... meanwhile I did some digging around in family trees of soloman cavanaugh and the same names kept coming up: Cavanaugh, Wanvig, Gass, Nichols, Andrews. 

I am going to have to do another part to this as I am still waiting on more information, but I promise there is more to this story... we aren't done yet, so please stay with me.