Better

Thank you to everyone who has reached out to me since my last post. The support is really invaluable.

The past couple of weeks has been a really nice break from doctors, taking lots of meds, and feeling so focused on getting more results in a few days or a few weeks. I'm not going to say that things are 100% great, but they are better. Maybe it's just my hormones getting back into a "normal" balance, but I am feeling better than I have in a while.

We still don't really know what's going to happen or exactly what we're going to choose to do next, but for the meantime we've got a lot of activities with family and friends set up for the fall to look forward to.

Where to go from here?

I feel more uncertain about our journey to try and have a baby now than I have in a long time, at least the past year. In my last surgery the Dr found one possible adhesion and cut it, but more importantly said that my uterine lining is just inflamed and very patchy looking, which is not optimal, and it needs some time to heal from all the procedures over the past two years.

I've been thinking a lot about how it's been two years this month since my first miscarriage. It's so hard to believe and has gotten me pretty down, I think mainly because it doesn't feel like we're much closer to having a baby.We're not really decided on where we go from here. We know we're going to take at least 2 months without any treatments to hopefully get my lining to heal up. But we're also out of my insurance coverage for IVF. Meaning that anything we do going forward with the specialist that is related to infertility is ALL out of pocket.So- IF my lining starts looking better do we try and do a transfer? Do we look for a surrogate for our embryos? Do we just try on our own so that we can go to my regular Dr, but run a higher risk of more miscarriages and therefore more procedures? Do we start the adoption process? I don't know any more. It just feels like almost every option is committing a lot of money and/or time, with no guarantee of success. 

If anyone has advice on what they think we should do I would love to hear it!

last procedure?

Hysteroscopy tomorrow. Let's hope this is my last surgery/ procedure for a LONG time. Dr is checking for scarring/ adhesions/ low level infection, and although he thinks there is only a small chance of finding any of those I am almost hoping that he finds something so that we can fix it!

Not sure what the game plan will be after that or how long we will wait to try the whole estrogen/ transfer protocol again.

In the meantime we are getting somewhat more serious with adoption research, at the very least to feel like we are doing something. I will admit that I am pretty frustrated at this point that it's been about a year since we started seeing the specialist and although I know having 2 embryos on ice is a good thing and progress, in some ways it feels like we haven't really gotten any closer to having a good sense of what is going on or any closer to actually having a baby through all of the tests, appointments, and treatment this year.

July Update

So, we may have jumped the gun in thinking our decision would be about whether to transfer 1 or 2 embryos, as we are now waiting to see if we will be able to transfer any. My uterine lining didn't cooperate with thickening up with estrogen pills, estrogen patches, viagra suppositories, blood thinners, and acupuncture, so we're taking a step back to try and figure out what's going on.

The plan is currently to wait a few weeks then do a hysteroscopy to make sure I don't have any scarring that's affecting things or any low-level infection. Dr said that he thinks it's unlikely that I have either but still worth ruling them out. Then we see if taking a few months to re-set my estrogen and other levels makes a difference. The thing that makes me worry is that looking back over my chart with Dr last week I have pretty consistently had thin uterine lining during cycles in the fall and in both IVFs....the guidelines say you need lining above 8 mm to have a good shot at sustaining a pregnancy and I have pretty consistently been at only 5-6.

So we're trying to decide where we go from here, it will be at least several months before we would think about doing a transfer again (and that's if my lining cooperates) and then its about 50/50 that I would get or keep a pregnancy. So time to start really looking into adoption and decide if we want to pursue that route. Wish I had better news but that doesn't seem to be how this goes for us!

Lucky number.....

Two. That's what we've got- 2 embryos that came back as genetically "normal". It's good news overall since having 0 would have been really disappointing and having 1 would have been very nerve-racking. And while it's a good step in our progress it's also in some ways a reminder that we have a lot more steps to go to get to having a baby.

We don't know yet whether we'll transfer both at once or one at a time to give us the best chance of success. Right now we're focused on getting my body ready for a transfer in a week or two.

We'll see what happens next.....

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.....