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.....

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!

Well this sucks.

For anyone who was hoping for a good news post, this will not be it. As much as I would have really loved to have something positive to share we haven't had much of that over the past week.

Since my egg retrieval last Sunday I have pretty much been a cloud of pain and nausea meds since I developed moderate/ severe OHSS (ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome) that was kind of scary and overall just very unpleasant to deal with. You can google it if you want, but in a nutshell OHSS is where after egg retrieval/ ovulation your hormones go kind of haywire and your body decides to retain fluid, causing the very fun side effects of pain, nausea, dehydration, and abdominal swelling. I felt ok Sunday and Monday after retrieval and then Tuesday into Wednesday started feeling worse and worse- I usually am not a nauseous person but when one anti-nausea med was not enough and I had to go on another and then that still wasn't enough I was not a happy patient. Plus my abdomen from Tuesday on looked like someone had stuck a balloon in my stomach and inflated it, making absolutely everything uncomfortable including walking and sleeping.

I wound up so miserable that I went in to see the Dr on Wednesday afternoon and then went in to get fluid drained on Thursday. 3 liters, from my abdomen. Kind of gross even to me. Thankfully, I didn't end up with the "worst" stage of OHSS which would have been either hopitalization for dehydration or the insertion of a drain into my side for a week or two to allow fluid to continuously drain. I definitely felt better after the procedure, but then still had the swelling/ pain/ nausea trifecta for several more days since draining the fluid provides a temporary solution but it does come back. Today (Monday) is the first day I am feeling sort of perkier, and by that I mean it's 10 am and I'm just starting to contemplate whether I can get by without some nausea medicine. Supposedly I'll feel mostly better by the end of the week.

Then on Saturday, to add insult to injury we got news about our embryos. Out of the 30 that we had at the beginning of the week only 3 had made it to Saturday, and 1 was graded "fair" and 2 "poor". So, this sucks. We spent a while talking to the Dr and the thinking is that something is happening with the DNA that is causing it to mismatch and therefore not have viable embyros. 

Not the best weekend in our household to say the least. But for the time being I'll be recovering and figuring out options going forward.