But life had other plans | Hacker News Reader

But life had other plans

danlebrero.com

1,718 pointsJBiserkov225 comments

Life finds a way. My wife had generalized tonic-clonic seizure for an entire year (non previous seizure history) without any cause being detected by multiple MRIs. She was taking increasing doses of Levetiracetam that somehow controlled the scope of the seizures but not avoid them completely. After a year of this, we go for another ER visit after the latest one and she ask, somehow randomly, to have a pregnancy test, it comes negative but, finally, the root cause of the seizure does appear on imagery, at that point a low grade astrocytoma. She went into major brain surgery to try to remove it and pathology confirms the low grade astrocytoma, and after a month of recovery, the oncologist recommends to start a chemo and radio therapy treatment.

As the low grade astrocytoma is treatable and with high long term survival rate, he recommends that we might extracts some ovules if we decide to have another kid in the future, as the chemo had a high chance of infertility. We had one son, and being both on our middle to late 30s, we agreed.

We go to her OG for this, and as he is performing an preliminary echography... a heart beat start blasting on the speakers, over two months of his negative blood pregnancy test, after major brain surgery, after major doses of meds of all kinds, she was, indeed, pregnant. We knew exactly when she got pregnant, it was 5 days before that ER visit. She "knew" it that day in the ER, that's why she asked for the pregnancy test (that, once again, came negative).

She decided to have the baby, no matter what the risk for her it was, no matter what risk for the baby it was. Chemo was out the question and radio treatment was a high risk and had to wait for at least another month. 6 months later we had a healthy baby, who is now a healthy 10 year old girl.

Sadly, some months after given birth to her, my wife had a relapse, the brain tumor came back, this time as GBM, a month after the girl second birthday, she passed away.

Life found a way, tho, and my wife never had any remorse of the decisions we made and she would be proud of what her sons are coming to be

I'm so sorry. Thank you for sharing your story.

Thanks. We are all as good as we can be now, Life, aside of finding ways, continues.

Thank you for sharing that.

Sorry for your loss

Jesus, this is heartbreaking. I'm so sorry.

I haven't gone through anything quite like that, but after friends' deaths and suchlike, I always loved this passage from Slaughterhouse-Five:

> The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

> When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

Somehow it has a similar content of this one published in "Facts of the Faith", 1919:

--- Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used, put no difference in your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we shared together. Let my name ever be the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.

Thank you for sharing <3

This is a heart breaking story. Stories like these really put life in a different perspective. This sort of reminds of me my brother's wife story. She died of Glioblastoma at very young age (age 34).

Thank you for sharing this.

A heart-breaking story, thank you for sharing.

Hearth-breaking. All the love to you and your family.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

This is heart breaking of course, but is it wrong to say it's also beautiful? That her last act before death was to create and nurture new life. There's something amazing about that

Several years ago my wife and I agreed we'd actively start making a baby and quit contraceptives. She was on the pill (progestogen-only) and we'd been using it for the better part of three years. Worked fine, she took it religiously at the same time every day.

So we agreed to quit, and the next day she comes to me, awkwardly, saying "It worked!" half-jokingly. I stared at the pregnancy test, positive and unambiguous as ever. At the second test, too.

Turns out she'd been already pregnant for almost a month. That kind of contraceptive is only 99% effective. Our daughter was born eight months later.

Safe to say, the missing percentage is warranted.

I thought the contraceptive doesn't prevent the pregnancy but just causes the body to menstruate regardless. So she might have been pregnant many times but this time it wasn't terminated by mensuration? (I'm certainly not very confident in my understanding.)

No, this is incorrect.

> The birth control pill works by stopping sperm from joining with an egg. When sperm joins with an egg it’s called fertilization.

> The hormones in the pill safely stop ovulation. No ovulation means there’s no egg for sperm to fertilize, so pregnancy can’t happen.

> The pill’s hormones also thicken the mucus on the cervix. This thicker cervical mucus blocks sperm so it can’t swim to an egg — kind of like a sticky security guard.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/birth-...

Or as my partner says: my tummy is making a baby nest, but it’s always empty.

This is correct with the additional caveat that the pill also thins the uterine lining, making it difficult for the embryo to implant in the rare event of fertilization. So for people concerned about avoiding an abortion, the pill rarely, but not never, results in abortion.

I vaguely remember misinformation about birth control in Catholic school. They told us that IUDs kill fertilized eggs.

It was completely wrong.

If the timeline of conception feels off or extraordinary, you owe it to yourself to get a DNA test. 18 years is a long time friend. Trust but verify.

I’m…not sure I follow. Are you implying that her contraceptive pill was somehow less effective against the sperm of someone else?

That there are situations where women have affairs and get pregnant in very narrow timelines then have their partner think it’s their child.

Putting the morality of this aside and speaking practically, unsuspecting men should have a DNA test if the timeline of conception feels off or extraordinary.

Does it really matter whose child it is? You seem to be writing this as if she might give birth to a goblin or something like that.

I can't see what's "speaking practically" and "putting the morality aside" here, because there's not really any practical difference.

It's a question of trust, for starters?

So what is the test that the husband should undergo? I mean why only think about the faithfulness of the wife?

A woman always knows that the child is hers. It's not a symmetrical issue

> Does it really matter whose child it is?

I'm not sure I understand. Are you asking why it matters for a man to unknowingly raise another man's child, which his wife conceived while being unfaithful to him?

>Does it really matter whose child it is?

Umm what? Do you not see the inherent breakage of trust if your wife is having sex with someone else in a monogamous relationship and then trying to pass off someone else' kid as yours?

It doesn't matter for this story of contraception not working 100%.

1) You seem to have totally focused on the "parent" role, and forgotten the "partner" aspect. This has major implications for the relationship.

2) The practical difference is choice. Biological parents are pretty stuck. People in this situation aren't at all.

Nope. Once you have kids being the parent is the most important thing.

We should note that, yes, being the parent is the most important thing, but the quality and effort put into the partnership has a substantial effect on the quality of the parenting.

How is raising someone else’s child a moral obligation? If a man’s wife has a child with her lover her lover has an obligation to raise the child. He’s the father. The mother’s husband has no relation to the child.

Yes! Especially several years later. Stupid shit happens, to all of us. And if the kid has 'adopted' the father, then for many years it will be outright traumatic to cut the relationship and trust if that kid just because if some test. Oh, not my DNA, then I don't love you? How narcissistic of a father would that be? Joseph of Nazareth would like to have a word, too...

No, there should be very good and compelling reasons to request a DNA test.

Making a man raise someone else’s child is not “stupid shit”. It is a calculated major betrayal.

If Joseph chose to raise someone else’s child that’s nice for him. Great. He made a morally laudable, superogatory choice. That’s very different from being betrayed by your loved one and deceived into raising someone else’s child.

> Joseph of Nazareth would like to have a word, too...

Joseph was going to "divorce her quietly"[1] until an angel intervened.[2] He was kind (was not going to cause her more trouble than necessary) but he also wasn't going to raise another man's child brought about by his almost-wife's (at the time, he thought) infidelity. I think many of us would also reconsider when directed to raise the scion of a deity by a literal angel.

[1] https://biblehub.com/matthew/1-19.htm

[2] https://biblehub.com/matthew/1-24.htm (the interaction was the the verses prior.)

What are the compelling reasons not to get a DNA test as a man (when a woman is claiming, “You are the biological father of this baby.”)?

Is it expensive or illegal or will your friends shame you or the woman will be angry?

In this case, it would show that he doesn't trust his wife.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, if it's truly his child, why would his wife be opposed to verifying that? Not to mention that it can likely be done without her knowledge.

Suggesting that not only do you not trust your wife but you also don’t trust her so much so that you get a paternity test without her knowledge shows a huge lack of faith in the relationship, and I would caution against this. Please remember the original circumstance is that a woman ends up pregnant on an imperfect birth control; there’s no reason or contextual evidence for any sort of cheating behavior. Assuming your partner is cheating with no evidence sucks. Assuming your partner might be cheating so much so you have to get a paternity test sucks even more for the non-cheating partner.

This is in situations where a heterosexual woman gets suspicious if her partner has literally any female friends. What if she started going around and wanting paternity tests of your friend group if they happen to be pregnant, just to make sure you didn’t cheat with any of your friends, despite you remaining faithful the entire time?

It’s very kind of you to write this all out, but frankly if you’re the kind of person who worries about stuff like that you’ll poison your relationship with distrust regardless. If not this than something else.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say someone can’t worry about stuff like this. Emotions like worry can happen as a result of prior trauma, generalized anxiety disorder, and several illnesses that have paranoia in their symptom profile. It’s fine to have worries and that manage your worries in a healthy manner, such as therapy, medication when appropriate, meditation, and speaking transparently to your partner to try and figure out what is triggering your worry response (rubber ducking your own brain!).

It’s important to separate emotion from action. You can experience an anxiety inducing thought (such as my partner might be cheating on me) and behave in a variety of healthy and unhealthy ways.

Like OP said: trust but verify. Speaking from experience, lol.

I’m sorry your trust was violated. Your traumatic experience where your trust was violated shouldn’t be used as a warning label for others. There is no reason to advocate that other people behave as if their partners are unfaithful without prior evidence because you personally were wronged in a deeply hurtful way.

It is important to healthily evaluate what is a relatively uncommon but seriously hurtful thing that happened to oneself and how that distorts one’s understanding of what’s normal behavior in intimate relationships.

But how else are you going to get evidence? Doing a paternity test is the act of gathering data which could further be used as evidence of faithfulness of your partner.

Or else it's just blind trust without any firm footing in reality.

If you can't be arsed to do the test for a ONCE or TWICE in a lifetime kind of event with long term consequences because you somehow feel hurt that your partner isn't a fool who builds his life around blind faith.. well, there's not much to be said...

This is a trauma response style logic where the bad/harmful thing is the default and the healthy thing needs to be proven. The fact of the matter is that cheating to the point of clandestinely having children is abnormal and unusual. It isn’t blind faith that your partner is faithful; your partner will show you their faithfulness just by the act of being your partner. It’s not staying out without explanation. It’s emotional engagement with the relationship. It’s transparency when things get boring. It’s the labor in keeping the relationship fresh and interesting. Overlooking this to lean towards mistrust also devalues the labor of your partner and shows your bias towards past trauma. I understand this thing is big stakes and is very hurtful, but even grand hurts doesn’t justify no longer paying attention to basic reality for over-cautious behavior.

There's no trauma response, data suggests that cheating is common. Thereon following through with the baseless assumption that this totally won't happen to you is downright foolish.

All this wishy washy pretense about "emotional engagement" comes off as super dishonest, just to weasel your way out of doing a test (which should be a standard procedure anyway).

That's one of those times where the faithfulness has to be put to test.

Trying to weasel your way out of doing it via emotional manipulations is more of a red flag than anything.

IMO you make a wise point:

Doing a paternity test may necessarily or inadvertently reveal to his wife a limit of his trust for her.

What are compelling reasons to get one? Worst case scenario, you have baby.

I do not want to invest significant resources into progeny that is not my own. Doing a paternity test reduces the possibility of this.

Although I realize there are people that think this way, this is totally removed from the way my mind works.

You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from?

There are plenty of folks who have to rely on sperm donors or surrogate mothers to make a baby happen.

> You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from?

Thinking about raising a baby from some other father activates my disgust reaction. But maybe it’s more related to the idea of the woman’s (hidden?) infidelity than the baby itself.

> There are plenty of folks who have to rely on sperm donors or surrogate mothers to make a baby happen.

I don’t see other people’s difficulties as relevant to my preferences.

For example, homeless people eating from trash cans doesn’t affect my dietary choices.

Your intuitions about family and human relations are deeply abnormal and you should be aware of that for the future when you talk to people.

I would say it is more likely that consciously or unconsciously the woman started missing pills the month before. The couple was already considering it so it wasn't a big deal if she missed some pills. My wife and I were very fertile, we got pregnant on the first try every time we tried. I suspect that the birth control was barely working.

We suspected this as well. She is lactose intolerant and has IBS, this can cause complications with the efficacy of the pill.

We weren't making it easy for the contraceptive either. I mean, several times a day, every day, for years... One of them was bound to get through eventually anyway.

I've understood that this kind of contraceptive makes only conception extremely difficult, not impossible. She was still ovulated (tested), and had regular periods.

It was extremely easy for us to conceive our second child. Now we have two pretty kids!

But we have to be really, really, really careful, lest we have yet another...

Assuming you’re living close to your partner, the actual amount of effort necessary would be a lot. The very narrow time window described is actually multiple weeks long. This is because when you go off hormonal birth control the first thing that happens is you have a period, then you need to stop taking it long enough for your body to rebuild the lining enough to be receptive.

You really have to not be paying attention to your partner, or your partner and your lifestyle is that neither of you live closely, for this to just happen.

Additionally, I feel this amount of mistrust should say a lot more about the relationship than about the woman. If you don’t trust your partner not to go off her birth control for multiple weeks to get secretly pregnant with someone else, why are you their partner? frankly your partner deserves better than you.

> Turns out she'd been already pregnant for almost a month. That kind of contraceptive is only 99% effective. Our daughter was born eight months later.

This kind of "oops" is very common.

If/when you're done having children, or have no desire for children, you really need to get surgery.

My interpretation of the events and GPs question is that the timeline of intercourse/conception wasn't suspect, only the efficacy of the contraception. The only scenario where deception and the suggested test of such makes sense in this case would be if the partner had stopped using contraception earlier by choice and had an affair.

I don't know why DNA tests are not standard practice. It's easy and you are already at the hospital.

Yeah, my wife an I had the conversation and decided that she was going to go off of birth control in a few weeks. Two weeks later, she missed her period.

I promised to get a vasectomy on the spot.

A few weeks later she learned that her sister also had an oops. They both gave birth within a few days of each other.

Typically, it’s 99% per year or something like that. Even with perfect use that’s a 1 in 10 chance per decade.

Yeah I always wondered what the 99% actually means. 99% of the times you have intercourse? 99% out of 100? 99% per some time frame?

The pill always worried me a bit when younger because most women I knew didnt take it religiously at the same time everyday and it wasnt clear if we were then... 75% safe? 50% safe? 98% safe?

I guess it was enough safe enough for me but I imagine it could have gone the other way pretty easily.

Birth control metrics are almost always phrased as "X % couples having regular intercourse won't get pregnant." So pill and IUD being 99% means 1 / 100 heterosexual couples will get pregnant every year, on average.

Who first started the conversation? I wonder if the hormones swirling through her system made her more likely to feel ready for a child. Or perhaps the pregnancy induced change in her pheromones suddenly made you feel more nurturing of her. Probably not, but it's funny how sometimes things work out like that

Wife and I had an unlikely pregnancy ourselves. We tried for possibly 8 years with no luck, finally we gave in and started the process to do in vitro with entailed lots of tests and everything. Then, the day before we were scheduled to start the process (during xmas no less) and lay down a lot of $$$ for the procedure, wife takes a pregnancy test and shockingly, it indicates positive. Kid was born healthy and happy. I hesitate to call him some kind of xmas miracle kid, but I mean.. the context and everything really drove the point home. :)

I'm really happy you saved a ton of money and got what you wanted. IVF is not only mega costly, it's also a brutal roller coaster of emotions for all involved.

Indeed. I went through that for second kid and it was just excruciatingly bad for my wife. 28 day cycle of absolute misery and disappointment for months. We are divorced now but I still feel bad for what she experienced emotionally.

Unless you live in a country like The Netherlands, where the first three IVF procedures are, in fact, free. I won't disagree with you on the roller coaster of emotions, though.

Or France, where the first 4 procedures are paid for by health services. Going to the pharmacy for the ovarian stimulation drugs for my wife and seeing the one-week treatment would have cost us hundreds of euros; I sure was glad to live in such a country!

What does the word “free” mean here?

I assume the clinical professionals are paid and the researchers were paid and the pharma venders are paid, so that money is coming from somewhere. Is it that someone other than you pays for it?

Certainly. It's being paid for by the universal basic health care that our government provides. One of the reasons we pay taxes.

Okay, you give the government money (taxes) and then the government pays the clinics for your medical care (with the tax money).

But doesn’t that mean you’re still paying for your own medical care with the government acting as a middle-man? So then it’s not free.

You are missing the key feature: solidarity.

It is not paying for your own medical care it is paying a small proportion of everyone's medical care.

And in fact for a proportion of the population it is in fact free or nearly so because they have never paid any income tax or the cost was so high that the taxes they did pay plus the proceeds of selling very possession they had and selling their children into servitude still wasn't enough to pay for it.

And lastly, we all understand the point of taxation and redistribution (at least in Europe we do) so what exactly was the point you were repeatedly failing to make clear?

> And in fact for a proportion of the population it is in fact free or nearly so because they have never paid any income tax or the cost was so high that the taxes they did pay plus the proceeds of selling very possession they had and selling their children into servitude still wasn't enough to pay for it.

Okay, so if the person receiving the service doesn’t pay taxes, then they do not pay for the service. And for everyone else that does pay taxes, it is a cost with no attendant service.

> we all understand the point of taxation and redistribution (at least in Europe we do)

What is the point?

> what exactly was the point you were repeatedly failing to make clear?

I don’t have some huge point. I’m just confused by this usage of “free”. There are other usages that I find confusing as well.

A child tells his friends that everything on Amazon is free, meanwhile his parents silently pay for his purchases.

Someone steals a car and tells her friends that she has a new free car.

Wait until you hear about insurances, where it is perfectly normal (in fact the whole point) that the vast majority of people pay in more than they get back.

I generally don’t refer to a repair subsidized by my car insurance as free. Do you?

Do you feel like this was an insightful point that needed clarification?

Sure, if for some reason you want to take the most absolute, most pedantic definition of the word 'free' and you are utterly confused by it meaning something else then, yes, it is not free.

I hope this clears things up for you.

It's pretty clear what 'free' means here, the person getting the treatment is not billed for the treatment. In that way, a society organizes that no one has the existential threat (financially or medically) of prohibitively high cost.

It's so obvious that I don't understand how people still see it as this elevating 'gotcha' moment. It's the same when you drink free beer, breath free air, enjoy free time, etc: obviously it doesn't just appear from nothingness but has (opportunity) cost.

> It's pretty clear what 'free' means here, the person getting the treatment is not billed for the treatment.

Actually I think that’s a pretty good example of what confuses me about this usage of “free”. Usually when I call something “free” I am making a claim about who pays for the thing, but as you pointed out, in this case it has something to do with who is billed by the service provider.

> In that way, a society organizes that no one has the existential threat (financially or medically) of prohibitively high cost.

IMO, no current Earth society comes close to that criteria. For example, if someone has a currently untreatable disease, then isn’t that just saying the cost of treatment is prohibitively high? ie, the cost of hiring scientists, renting lab space, running trials, etc.

> in this case it has something to do with who is billed by the service provider.

What else could it even be? You started your gotcha with the truism that it's not free, so, yeah, nothing is free, and the whole discussion is meaningless. You're arguing in bad faith, but that just makes your argument meaningless.

> no current Earth society comes close to that criteria. For example, if someone has a currently untreatable disease

Your counterargument is that there exist diseases that cannot be treated anywhere?

Let me give you an example of something treatable: Endemic (flea-borne_) typhus. In Europe, the given example is "British POWs in Germany at the end of World War I when they described conditions in Germany." [1] In the US, instead Typhus shows up in the reports of the LA Medical Association as a regular occurence (among homeless, mostly). [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic_typhus [2] https://www.ladocs.org/news-events/news/lac-dph-health-alert...

I agree with much of what you said, but I don’t think they’re arguing in bad faith at all.

I only see two options, bad faith or childishly naive, so I suggested the more flattering option. In either case it's tiring to argue this 'gotcha' strawman - no one here on HN believes that things just materialize.

But I do think it's bad faith, because I doubt burrows picks the same kind of pointless argument about semantics when someone offers him a free sample at Costco, or a free beer, or is confused when reading the Washington Post online, even though it says 'Post' right there in the name, and that the printed New York Times doesn't really tell you the time, and that Fox News is not about foxes at all (even though it absolutely should be).

Yes, but there is a long history of thinking about the various definitions for "free". This alone warrants the discussion. Surely they see what you mean, but it does sound like you both default to different definitions of the word. I agree with you, but I maintain that you are being much to certain about the naivety of the objection.

Because we're on HN:

There's 'free' as in beer ...

And there's 'free' as in 'freedom'.

All that is true, but burrows conveniently switches back and forth between definitions just to keep a 'controversy' alive. Hence bad faith.

[edit] Also, I cannot really see how anyone, not even burrows, would confuse 'free' treatment with 'free as in speech'.

> What else could it even be?

As I said, my usage is closer to calling a thing “free” if I consume it without paying for it, and importantly it doesn’t matter who receives the bill.

If my wife buys a new couch for our home with a credit card that is nominally her’s, but for which I make the payments, I would not call the couch free despite the credit card bill being in her name.

> You started your gotcha with the truism that it's not free, so, yeah, nothing is free, and the whole discussion is meaningless. You're arguing in bad faith, but that just makes your argument meaningless.

I just asked a question about the meaning of “free” in this context.

> Your counterargument is that there exist diseases that cannot be treated anywhere?

My counterexample to the claim, “There are current Earth societies where no one is unable to get treatment because of insufficient funds”, is anyone in these candidate societies with a currently untreatable disease.

I don’t understand your point about typhus.

> As I said, my usage is closer to calling a thing “free” if I consume it without paying for it, and importantly it doesn’t matter who receives the bill.

Well then that's exactly, word for word, what OP did. How are you confused if you use it the exact same way?

But I think OP does pay for it, as she suggests here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788837

First OP says, “X is free for me.”, then she says, “My taxes pay for X.” It looks to me that says she both does and does not pay for it, that’s why I’m confused.

In what kind of world did you expect that "X is free for me" would imply that nobody is getting paid for anything regarding an IVF treatment? It clearly means that, _other than paying taxes like everyone else in the free world_ I do not have to pay for it.

This is at the same level as finding a free penny on the street and going "No, but hang on, _someone_ paid to mint this penny so I am extremely confused as to why you would say this penny is free?!"

I hope the other posts in this subthread have made things explicit enough for you, and perhaps you can use this discussion as a heuristic for parsing these kinds of statements in the future.

> It clearly means that, _other than paying taxes like everyone else in the free world_ I do not have to pay for it.

So, other than paying for it, I don’t have to pay for it?

Again, I find this sort of comment confusing.

> This is at the same level as finding a free penny on the street and going "No, but hang on, _someone_ paid to mint this penny so I am extremely confused as to why you would say this penny is free?!"

I think it’s closer to calling the food in the refrigerator at my house “free”. Or calling repairs at the auto shop “free” when the insurance company (who I pay) pays the shop.

>Again, I find this sort of comment confusing.

Noted.

Do you also get confused by free food tastings in grocery stores?

Yes. And when buying hot dogs.

In my late 30's, with the only indication that we were fertile at all having been an ectopic pregnancy many years before, we gave up. We had wanted kids, but our lives were good, with nieces and nephews we love.

A few months before my 40th birthday - and the pandemic - SURPRISE!

We are currently the proud but exhausted old parents of an increasingly rambunctious toddler.

That is quite a nice surprise! I hope your child has a joyful life.

You aren't that old. I know someone who had twins in his mid 40s. My cousin also had multiple pregnancies in her 40s.

I also had my last a few months before my 40th birthday.

BTW: "Oopsies" are common. If you're 100% done, consider surgical birth control.

> BTW: "Oopsies" are common. If you're 100% done, consider surgical birth control.

Yes. Not a doctor, but according to my wife, if you previously had difficulties getting pregnant, it may be easier to get pregnant again after the first birth.

I was getting ready to read a tragedy but was pleasantly surprised by the ending.

Same this was going rough then so much better.

Right? In my head I had heard cancer before I clicked the article, and spoiler alert, yes, but also what a twist!

sweet rollercoaster isn't it

I have an urgent deadline to release some crazy python code and here I am, instead, cutting onions. Beautiful way to start a day, happy life to you and your family <3

I'll bite :) what's the python code for?

Oh it automates the cutting of onions.

Perhaps a model to calculate the effectiveness of birth control pills.

When my wife and I decided to try for a baby and stopped using protection, the very first pregnancy test she ever took was positive, and we weren't sure we were reading it right because we'd never done this before. Unfortunately she miscarried pretty much immediately (fetus never developed a heartbeat).

We tried again, but had no luck for several years and eventually made an appointment with a fertility clinic. Literally the very next day she tested positive, and we now have two kids.

As a recent medical school graduate and a technical founder of a medical education startup, wow. This is an "edge case" for lack of a better phrase and is the kind of stuff that becomes widespread as lore or an interesting story - at least I'd like to think so.

Thanks for sharing your story and I wish you the best with what's next.

IMHO the surest way to get pregnant is to be told by a doctor that you can't.

This is an interesting thought to entertain, but it sounds like sampling bias [0]. It's less remarkable if a doctor tells a patient that she can't get pregnant, and she doesn't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

“ They Said I Would Never Walk Again And I Really Have To Commend Them For Their Spot-On Diagnosis”

The onion headline

Some fertility specialists will say on first consult, the odds that you could get pregnant naturally just went down as you walked through the door to my office.

All because the kind of people who visit a fertility specialist have lower fertility stats than the kind of people who don't (duh). The average practitioner doesn't really excel at distinguishing between correlation and causation.

Yes. I found it interesting that fertility specialists are actually quite focused on statistics. It's because in majority of infertility cases there is either no explanation at all, or no absolute blockers to pregnancy, just less chances. The entire field is in big part focused on how to improve patient's chances in this dice roll.

Wouldn't you say that's a naive application of conditional probability?

This is an amazing story! Classic race condition :)

Those race conditions are always tricky to reproduce.

God DAMN it

I hope 'brailsafe (whose jokey (and IMHO, low-effort) comment was heavily downvoted then flagged into oblivion) takes note -- this is a good example of a funny that this community appreciates.

I don't understand how this is a race condition, but I might need to check my old undergrad textbooks though. Props for the quirkyness, though! :>

A pregnancy doesn't show up on a pregnancy test (a read operation) until after implantation and enough fetal growth to significantly impact the mother's hormone levels. So, there was a write (fertilization) followed by a read (pregnancy test) without any synchronizing operation. The pre-op pregnancy test missed the pregnancy because of the race between the read and the write.

I think I read that entire post in one breath. That was an emotional train that fortunately had a good ending. May the child live a long and happy life.

Breathtaking! Somehow, the one upvote I'm allowed to give didn't seem enough. I read loads of "cold reality" stories every morning ( I check WSJ, NYT and Bloomberg once in the morning ) and perhaps due to this conditioning, I was expecting something depressing. But this made my day.

In the US that would be medical malpractice. A pregnancy test would be standard before this type of surgery.

That said, congratulations for the best outcome.

The article mentioned it was too early to be detected

In the surgery. 5 months pregnant is VERY detectable

edit: wait sry - it also says 2 weeks, so now I dont know how to read what its saying

The 5 month figure is after the entire summer following the surgery and recovery. The embryo was two weeks old during the surgery in May.

A standard urine-based pregnancy test turns positive ~10-12 days after conception. So the embryo must’ve been even younger. Probably 3-6 days.

Conception happens in the Fallopian tube, it takes 2-3 days for the fertilized egg to reach the uterus for nidation.

From a hormonal level, a pregnancy is undetectable, because literally nothing happens in the woman’s body at first. The increase in progesterone happens after every ovulation. The embryo isn’t connected to the mothers blood stream yet. And you can’t see on an ultra sonic scan whether the egg is fertilized or not.

What a crazy story.

It was undetectable at the time of the surgery to remove the ovaries and Fallopian tubes.

At the time of the surgery, the embryo was young enough to not be detected but old enough to be out of the Fallopian tubes and not depend on the ovaries’ hormones anymore.

Older than one week, but younger than three. A two-week window.

And after that surgery, I could understand not suspecting pregnancy for abdominal swelling.

Something to consider (or if you're dead set against this idea, don't): Sounds to me like God wacking you over the head with a 2X4 and saying "Hey! Hello?! I'm here. (Yes, for both what you humans call "good" and "bad" <smh>) So be in touch, and stop calling Me "Life"!! "

And all the people with bad luck? What's that, the devil?

Including this couple's 15 years of infertility, 3 miscarriages, cancer diagnosis, and months of surgery-related constant pain. If I believed in a benevolent god I think I'd have to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume this wasn't their plan. "It feels like a prank" is probably the nicest way you could put it.

Holy shit that’s the most emotional story I’ve read on HN. My wife and I are in tears over here.

Reading the end of this story made me really happy. I've had a HN account since 2016 and have never commented, until now :)

Life, while being fragile and vulnerable, can also be extremely resilient.

My cousin and his girlfriend became pregnant a few years ago but the fetus were stuck outside the uterus, so the decision was made to have an abortion followed by a surgical cleansing (a scrape) to make sure nothing was left. The procedure was successful.

After the failed pregnancy my cousin's girlfriend started getting her period again but it was not as regular as it used to be. The doctors attributed it to the recent pregnancy/abortion which could cause irregularities in her hormonal balance etc.

So a while after all this happened, the girlfriend one night had what she believed to be gallstone pain in her stomach. She were familiar with gallstone attacks so that was the most logical explanation. Yet, she was sent to the hospital to have a checkup just to be safe.

You might have guessed it. The nurse at the hospital quickly figured out the cause of pain... She was pregnant and very much in labor. Of course this was 9 months after the abortion so it seemed impossible to her.

So apparently the abortion wasn't successful after all, as they overlooked a second fetus inside the uterus and also missed it while scarping the uterus lining.

So the girlfriend had to call up my cousin at work and tell him he was about to be a dad and that he had to come to hospital immediately. 4 hours later their daughter was born.

That was... one hell of a rollercoaster. All I can say is I'm glad everyone made it out alive.

Sorry for a small hijack. We have been trying a kid for a few years, doing IVF etc. with no luck so far. An endless source of irritation to me is a complete inability of the doctors to show any kind of probability distributions for the process. So, I'd like to find data that answers questions like how many embryos are alive after n days on average and on 10th percentile etc.

Does anyone know a decent data source for these kind of statistics?

I don't have a great data source, but from my experience (as a woman that tried to conceive two kids), reddit has awesome communities with users that can absolutely dig out those stats for you, if they exist: r/TryingForABaby, r/infertility

Don't get bogged down on statistics. They matter with large numbers, and in each cycle, you are dealing with at most a dozen or two fertilized eggs. Looking at all the stats only made us feel worse about our outcomes.

My wife and I were supposedly "perfect" candidates (doctors were convinced we'd conceive on the first try), but it took two full cycles and a number of FETs from all of a dozen or so good quality eggs to be transferred for our two kids (with the second, we had success with our last remaining frozen embryo, so make that two cycles and 9 embryos for the first kid — basically, with first, we were extremely unlucky, but then it was two FETs and no full cycles for the second, which was a relief).

Basically, for those who do get success on the first try, there have to be plenty of us that don't for the stats to average out to what they are.

I know two cases when people gave up trying to conceive, they got pregnant naturally.

One was doing IVF, the other hormone therapy. Both needed a break and both got pregnant in this break.

It makes you think how much stress and mind play a role.

> It makes you think how much stress and mind play a role.

Stress and the mind can also end a pregnancy sometimes...

The stress factor may actually be an evolutionary trait.

Something tells me Lucas is going to be a bit of a procrastinator. Congratulations :)

Not remotely as extreme as this, but we had a lot of trouble conceiving of our second child, after a very complicated birth for our first. We did want a second child, though, so we went through all sorts of fertility treatments, with no results except for one miscarriage. Eventually we were tired of it and gave up. After a few months we were ready to give it another go, and we'd start with new fertility treatments after her next period. That period never came, and we got another son instead (with a much easier pregnancy and birth than the first one).

It's all still quite recent, but we're currently in a similar boat. We don't yet have a child though, only a miscarriage a few years ago. Around Christmas/New Years, we had a bit of a chat about things and, accepting that the clock is definitely ticking, we were going to consider trying one round of fertility treatments. We want kids enough, but also are pragmatic enough to accept that things just might not work out for us on that front.

February comes along and she gets COVID. I happened to be about an hour out of town when she first tested positive, and we decided I should stay out there unless I too happened to test positive. A week passes, she's still testing positive on rapid tests, and most of her original symptoms are gone, but she's feeling "funky" nonetheless. On a whim, has a long-expired pregnancy test in the back of a drawer, and tests positive. I was coming into town for a Costco run the next day and picked up some fresh tests for her. Fresh test immediately comes back very positive.

At the Ultrasound they do measurements to evaluate how far along things are. 6 weeks! Later on that day I pulled out the calendar and start counting backwards... and smile because that was a really great weekend 6 weekends prior :D

Edit: next big hurdle is next week where we go back for a second ultrasound and hopefully see/hear a heartbeat. Everything else looked excellent at the first ultrasound, but it was just a bit too early according to the tech.

Congratulations with this great news in these complicated and confusing times!

“Life found a way out” would’ve been a nice title for this. :)

Edit: seriously, this is a fascinating account of how unexpected some life events can be, and then turn out to bring happiness that was sought but wasn’t expected.

Sure, but that title would have given it away.

Life.. uh.. finds a way

It's very important for people particularly women to test for BRCA. Men with the gene should alert female relatives. For those women that have the gene there are non surgical options today to prevent some of these cancers.

Highly recommend this documentary from PBS on the topic as well: https://inheritance-brcafilm.com/pbs-documentary

My Dad died after a long and difficult fight with prostate cancer that advanced to untreatable Stage 4 very quickly because of an underlying BRCA2 mutation. I'm so thankful the NHS tested him for this, and then tested my brother and I (both positive), and then sponsored IVF for my brother to concieve his first child with screening for BRCA2 mutation.

He now has a five month old baby girl who doesn't have the same coinflip requirement that BRCA2 brings girls of almost-guaranteed servere breast cancer and invasive life-changing surgery to reduce risk, and my brother and I both get MRIs at 40 and regular screening for when we (very likely) get prostate cancer.

This article was such a surprise to see at the top of HN, and I urge everyone to share it as both a lovely good news story and awareness of how underlying genes can cause aggressive cancers.

Wow I am not too religious a person but after reading this I have to say...when God (or some higher force) is with you, miracles likes this can happen.

God loves babies and wants us to be happy. Risked waking my 8 month old to give him a squeeze.

(1) not all of them, apparently, and (2) it seems arrogant to claim that.

Not the dunk you think it is for the billions of people who believe in a personal god and life everlasting.

believing in things that aren't true makes a lot of arguments fall flat

Another reason why it’s great to have many, you can round robin the one you wake up hugging in the middle of the night.

For something that supposedly loves babies, "god" sure enjoys spontaneously aborting them

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/372193v1

I call that force m'lady of large numbers and survivorship bias, or simply lady luck for short :)

It sounds like you are comparatively very religious compared to me. Rare events happen with a certain probability. What happened here was not impossible by any known law of biology or physics or whatever.

The odds of this happening! Beautiful. I wish the best for Lucas and the family.

Incredible story! It hits close to home for me because I am in fact a ‘miracle’ baby, although my story isn’t quite as dramatic as this one with the preventative surgery and such. My mother had many miscarriages before me (and one after). The doctors told her she would never have a child. They said it wasn’t possible. And yet here I stand!

Wow, love to read stuff like this.

My third kid also had given us a nice surprise. My wife was pregnant; we knew that. We had an appointment with the doctor for the first check-up. We came in and the doctor did not see a baby on the echo. We were not really badly shook up as we lost our first but we where not enjoying it either. Next day I am at work and I get a phone call from my wife. The hospital rang. The blood that was examined before we wend for the check-up had bad values and indicated a possible tumour (but not the bad kind). I raced home, we wend to the doctor. Before actually going into surgery he wanted to do an internal echo just to make sure where it was and how big it was.

There she was. We where pregnant.

Got damn. I was so scared to finish the article. Glad i pushed through it

> But the most incredible thing: when have you seen the public health service being earlier than planned?

What would have changed about the pregnancy if it wasn't earlier than planned?

It's a joke - the public health services in places like Canada and the UK have a (mostly unfair) reputation for never getting anything done in a timely manner.

It's almost as if there are entire lobbies that pour tons of money into PR efforts to promote those falsehoods and tarnish the reputations of those public services in order to shift public sentiment towards their privatisation!

It's almost as if people in those countries have experience of how they actually work!

What about injuries to the baby due to medicine, pain killers, or alcohol consumption? Could this be a problem?

Probably no riskier than being born into a poor household or in developing countries etc. Which is to say that you try to control what you can, and learn to live with the rest.

Yes, I have a friend who was born months early. Doctor said he would never walk or talk, but he does both basically as well as I do. You never really know, when it comes to surrounding circumstances of one's birth.

Hilariously good story.

What a beautiful story. A special little baby. I wish her and you both the happiest of families forever! :)

Amazing story, and I wish OP and his family all the best! I wonder what the effects of ovary removal will be on the embryonic development. I can imagine the ovaries produce hormones that affect the embryos development. Or is the embryo effectively hormonally isolated by the placenta?

If you read towards the end, a healthy baby was born.

It could be problematic in early pregnancy because the embryo relies on corpus luteum until placenta is developed (without corpus luteum the pregnancy would not continue). Afterwards it does not make a difference. I am not sure what happened in this case that the pregnancy was successful.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/72j71s/guy_doctor_my...

This is really nice to read. My wife and I went through a similar thing. Her mom found BRCA recently so my wife got tested.

Luckily she didn't have the mutation, but it was a very scary time because we have a young daughter who might have also had it.

Life, finds a way…

This is likely to be the best story I'll read all year. Simply amazing.

BRCA sucks. My sister died from ovarian cancer. She was positive and refused preventive removal.

I need to get checked. And if I am a carrier, my daughters will need to get checked, too.

I want to give every single person in this a huge hug. What an incredible story.

I cannot imagine how excited their mother-in-law was to be there for the birth of her grandchild.

What a story... glad life found its way. I had a chance to meet you at IG, and that made the story more real than real, so to say. All the best Daniel!

Thanks for sharing this lovely story! Our whole family was captivated as I read it aloud :). Congrats on the birth of your son and best wishes to all!

I was so worried this would be another one of those sad articles that I just cannot help but read to the end.

But then everything took a turn for the better :D

I have no words for how deeply this article affected me. In the words of the great philosopher Ian Malcolm "Life will find a way."

What a positive and uplifting story. Thank you for sharing, and BTW your writing is lucid, clever, and honest. Blessings to you all!

Wow what a story.

It reminds me of a joke we have in Spain about unlikely pregnancies. It ends with “If you got pregnant, we’re calling the baby McGyver”

I love this story, even more so that my wife and I this very week are embarking on our 4th and final IVF cycle. Hopeful stories inspire.

who ever soul was coming - really just wants to live so so badly. You'll give her a good childhood. Life is about joy

"Given that my wife didn’t recall talking with any angel lately..." Haha. That was a well-written tale.

Life.................................................................................................finds a way

Thank goodness this was a happy story.

Beautiful and uplifting story. Wish all of you the best of times together for the rest of your lives.

Simply the most lovely thing I have read all day. All week. Hell, maybe all year. Congratulations.

I thought this would be another grim medical tale, I'm glad I was wrong :)

Beautiful …. It was so refreshing to read an article with such happy ending.

Sometimes you need to let go your wishes fully go for them to become true.

This story seemed so heartbreaking, but the ending was totally worth it.

What a heartwarming story. Wish the author all the best with the newborn!

Hell of a story Dan! Congratulations on the new arrival and best wishes.

Life finds a way to flourish even in the most difficult conditions.

That is an incredible story! Best wishes to the family.

Congratulations to the new addition to your family!

What an excellent coincidence. Congratulations!

I love how these new generations loooove to post every single details of their lives. It’s great, but I am looking for some CC numbers next time, maybe a turd pic

I am in tears, also feeling happy for you!

Very uplifting. Thanks for sharing this.

What a plot twist! Thanks for sharing.

Congrats and good to know it all was fine at the last!

In 2014 when we first decided to have our kids, we tried almost a year but nothing worked out. Then we ended up going through multiple tests, different gynac consultations, too much time/money and emotional roller-coaster where finally doc said we can't conceive naturally because my sperm count was some millions but still less :-) . One gynac said right upto my face that 99% you can't have natural pregnancy ever!

So I started medicines/diet/exercise and almost gave up a hope and started exploring IUI and IVF treatments. We did 4 IUIs, all went unsuccessful, so only hope remaining was IVF. As we were already too tired going through all this for almost 2 years. Even IVF is expensive and we don't have public health care support I decided to take a break and took a project in another country to get some extra savings. After 6 months my wife resigned form her job and joined with me in a hope that we will save some money then go back and try our luck with IVF.

and here Life had other plans fits in - Just after 2 months she started feeling uneasy , so we though it might be some weather or food allergy. After few days she confirmed she is pregnant! that is the most pleasant surprise life has given me ever! We went back and were blessed with beautiful girl.

story continues, in 2020 we decided to take another chance, we were not optimistic as we thought we were very lucky in first place but it worked! super happy and one day my wife called me in office that she had a miscarriage, it was her 3rd month...she had to drive to her office daily.. so yes life had other plans.

We gave up again as we were almost 36+ and then 2020 pandemic started, we said that's it we won't have another child ever. But soon when pandemic gave a relief , wfh started we thought let's try as being at home we could avoid travelling and might help during pregnancy. So we took a chance and it worked again! but this time we had to go through constant fear of catching the virus throughout her 9 months, even post my baby boy arrived it was so tensed moments whenever we had to go out we had this fear that what if we get infected as we didn't have vaccines available till then. Looking back we agree it was a big risk we took.

finally we both are vaccinated, and my boy is about to complete a year!

what an incredible hope-giving story!

Congrats to the parents.

I appreciate and quite love the story, and congrats all around.

But this idea of putting awful GIFs into a rather serious and interesting story has got to stop. It did nothing but cheapen and interfere with the story being told.

Reaction GIFs are for uninteresting or ineloquent people. Just write how you feel!

The author shared the story in a way that resonated with themself — using reaction gifs.

It’s hard to ask them to write how they feel but tell them they can’t use reaction gifs.

To be clear - I'm not demanding anything. Only giving my opinion as an interested reader. He or she is free to disregard, just as every comment I make here.

Ascii, emojis and GIFs more accurately portray how I feel than the written language does. A lot of other people feel that way too. Image viruses also predate our kind of written language.

Reaction GIFs are for uninteresting or ineloquent people.

https://giphy.com/gifs/robert-downey-jr-sigh-confused-116a8z...

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