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.