Results and Moving On

It was probably a good thing that it was a week before my follow up with my doctor so that I had time to calm down. I was still raging with hormones and disappointment, but it was not nearly as bad as the days right after we got the news we weren’t doing a transfer.

I had a lot of people telling me that I should just be grateful just to get one embryo, but that did not make it any easier.

The doctor began by breaking down the statistics of what my husband and I have (low AMH and some male factors as well) and the averages of success going through IVF. We hit every average for all of those factors. Getting one embryo was actually what she was expecting. And I was shocked.

She hadn’t gone over these numbers with us before so I was thinking, “She got seven eggs at the retrieval, we should have maybe five or six embryos.” Wrong. Because of the issue with David’s sperm, getting two to fertilize was normal, even when using ICSI, and one of them lasting through day five was completely what she was expecting. I wish I would have known that before going in to this.

Secondly, she went on about how day six embryos are not more or less likely to survive than day five embryos, which helped, but she began talking about moving forward. Instead of transferring the one, she was afraid that when we came back to do a full cycle of IVF again, it could be a couple of years in the future if this embryo was successful. She encouraged us to go ahead and do all of our injections and retrievals and store all of our embryos because of my low AMH.

It made sense, and as much as I was ready to just do a Frozen Embryo Transfer Cycle, we started planning to do IVF again in September.

 

Transfer Day

I think my biggest complaint about our fertility center is that we do not get updates on our embryos every day between the retrieval and the transfer. You get the fertilization report on day 1, and you get a call on day 4 to schedule your transfer or cancel your cycle. There is nothing in between. Did I mention that Day 5 was going to be the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend?? So Day 4 is Saturday and we were glued to the phone waiting for our call. Nervous at this point was an understatement. She finally called at 3:30 and scheduled a transfer at 1pm on Sunday. I asked for the grade of the embryos but she said she didn’t have that but they wouldn’t have had her schedule unless at least one was ready. I cried happy tears. We went out to eat. We made plans.

Until 9:30 Sunday morning.

The doctor called and informed us that she was canceling the transfer. Apparently neither was ready and they wanted to give them another day. Since my cycle would be out of sync, we would be freezing the embryos if they were viable.

I managed to keep it together on the phone, but that was about it.

I had waited to get excited about the transfer until we go the call ok Saturday so I had no idea that a call Sunday was going to happen. It felt like I got hit by a truck.

I was told to stop all medication. I was done for now and potentially done without embryos at all.

The weight of that still makes me tear up. I wasn’t ready to be done. I had my progesterone station set up. They had already scheduled my first hcg blood test. But there was nothing I could do. This had nothing to do with me which is the primary reason I imagined that they would have to cancel. It wasn’t ohss it wasn’t my hormones. It wasn’t that the embryos hadn’t made it. It was they were just a little slow.

Calling my family telling them that it was canceled after having told them that it was set did not help me make sense of what I was feeling.

We started thinking of so many questions but since it was Memorial Day weekend there was no one to ask.

Monday the embryologist updated my chart that he had frozen one 4bb embryo. That was all the information we got. No call no here’s what is next. Just that.

And now we have more questions with no answers. We tried to relax on Monday since we were both off work but this feels like limbo. Since we were going to do a fresh transfer, I hadn’t done any research on what a frozen transfer would look like. The more I read on it, though, the more nervous it made me. We only have one. Do we go through a frozen transfer cycle when there are no backups? Do we go through ivf again? What do we do????

My follow up with my doctor is next Monday and hopefully she can make sense of what happened and where we should go from here.

Retrieval and Results

I was a lot less nervous about the procedure and a lot more nervous if there would be any eggs in those fifteen follicles for the retrieval.

It was scheduled for 9am on Tuesday so we triggered at 11pm on Sunday. It was just one injection but everything felt so much more important for that one.

I couldn’t eat after midnight Monday night, but I also could drink anything (even water) for 5 hours before the procedure. I thought about getting up at 4, but we decided if I could sleep that was the most important thing. I think I woke up at 5am. David was convinced he wasn’t going to eat breakfast in solidarity, but I encouraged him to get something in his stomach not knowing how long it would take me to wake up.

We get there, and we are both trying to stay calm as they take us back and I get into my gown. We have to sign the final papers and consent to the anesthesiologist.

I’m not sure why I had it in my head that we would be in one of the exam rooms but we were not. This was like full on surgery room. David didn’t get to go back with me and may have cried a little. I was just ready to be where I could get comfortable again. I was looking forward to waking up without the pressure. And I did. I could tell immediately when I opened my eyes things were better. I was loopy but there wasn’t any immediate pain. David helped me get dressed and we were off. We got there at 8:15 and were out by 10. And they informed me before we left that they got 7 eggs!!!! I was elated that there were eggs in there and apparently told the nurse all of our plans for our kids. I don’t remember any of that part.

My post op treat was a milkshake from Chick-Fil-a and then it was back to the sofa for me. I napped for a couple of hours, but I felt like I could take on the world. I could walk and wasn’t cramping anymore. It wasn’t until that night around bedtime that I started feeling having had surgery. I took Tylenol but should have taken the hydrocodone they prescribed me. It wasn’t super painful, but I could not lay there without discomfort. Good or bad, I went to work the next day, still just taking regular Tylenol. I did feel better without the swelling of my follicles, but after a couple of hours, I was trying to decide if I could get off the floor if I laid down. I didn’t want to chance it and stuck it out until noon.

Laying down has never been such a relief as we waited for results from the fertilization.

When they finally came in I’m not sure if I was recovered enough to read them without David there. We had 7 eggs. 5 were mature enough. Only 2 fertilized. Since they were using icsi I was really surprised that more hadn’t been fertilized. I was thinking maybe losing one but three was a blow to the gut.

Still we tried staying positive and started praying. We went from thinking we might get extras the first round to wondering if either would get to day five. Thursday the progesterone in oil kicked in to my recovery, and I had the worst constipation of my life (maybe tmi). If I have one recommendation, it is to start colace tablets. I was really afraid that we would have to cancel the transfer because of stupid constipation. It hurt so badly and pushing just tore me up. Everything hurt. If I had started the tablets sooner, I don’t think it would have been a problem, but I waited. I will never wait again! I really doubt I would have had pain if I had been smart about that part. I tried not to overdo but I was exhausted from my bathroom trips so I basically did nothing except go to work and then come home to the sofa.