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.