Lucky number 9?

9 has always been my family's "lucky" number. All 4 of us have 9 in our birthday, with my brother and I both having birthdays on the 9th (of different months). So I'm hoping that it's a good sign that we ended up with 9 embryo biopsies to send for genetic testing. As my Dr said, he's cautiously optimistic at this point.....it is a good number to start with, but we are all aware that it will be very possible for us to get back 1,2, or 0 that turn out to be genetically normal. The Dr actually showed me a sample test report when we were talking about whether to do IVF from a couple that had a similar history to us and sent in 9 embryos for testing, getting 1 back as normal.

But, all we can do now is wait and see. It is 2 weeks to get the test results back and not much to do in the meantime. The embryos are all re-frozen and waiting, and I'll start the process sometime in the next week of medicine to get me prepared to (hopefully) do a transfer. I'm not sure exactly what the protocol is at this point but I know it involves taking supplemental estrogen and then at some point taking progesterone shots to "trick" my body into thinking it's pregnant to prep for an embryo.

It's certainly nice to know that we have had at least one step start to go right, but funny enough it's almost served as more of a reminder to us about all of the rest of the thousands of things that will have to go right to end up with a baby. But, one step at a time.

Hoping for a good one

I had my retrieval the other day, and thankfully am feeling much better (so far at least) than after the first one. They retrieved 29 eggs of which 20 fertilized. So now we wait for a few days to see how many grow normally to be able to biopsy and send for genetic screening before they get frozen.

If things go well and we have one (or more) that come out normal we would look to do a transfer in 4-5 weeks; if not we'll be back on the road of looking at other options, probably through either donor eggs or donor embryos.

Let's hope that out of 20 we got at least ONE good one.....

And again.....

Today is day 5 of shots for our second round of IVF. We decided to try one more round and see if we can get lower quantity but better quality eggs this time, so I am on about half the dose of all of the stimulating drugs compared to last time. If this doesn't work out, we'll most likely look into the different options of donor eggs, donor embryos, or adoption.

Certainly not where we were hoping to be at this point- it seems funny now that we deliberated so much over the first round of IVF and then pretty quickly jumped into the second round but I guess it's one of those things that once you convince yourself it's the right path you are all in.

Anyways, fingers crossed that this time goes better both for me and my eggs!