01 November 2007

7th Day Transfer of 2 Blastocysts

Weight: 157.4 lbs
Mood: Keeping a lid on grief and optimism
Meds: PIO shots twice a day 1/2 ml

An evening of crying, soul searching, gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes and lots of chocolate consumed, that was my Halloween. We where told yesterday morning (day 6) that none of our embies where progressing past morula stage. They had until this morning at 10:30am before they where declared arrested. I couldn't cry until I got home from work, dh said if felt like he had been stabbed.

I had three big goals in my life and one was ripped from me. I feared perminent sperm disability, I feared for my own fertility, and I feared the looming expense of a 2nd try at something that is now a proven failure. I had to cry it out before I could step back and reassess the goal and it's alternatives. I can say that I did sleep well for a change having run a low grade fever with intestinal issues the last two days.

So with a heavy heart, dh and I set out for our IVF #1 post-mortum. It was nice enough day at least, the drive was quick and we arrived 10 minutes early.

Things started looking up with Nurse #2 entered the waiting room with our clipboard. Thats when I knew that something was positive. It wasn't the RE himself who is the bearer of bad news. I asked "We have something, I thought they all went belly up yesterday". She flipped the page and said we where transfering two. So she directed me into the surgical suite, asked me to strip waist down and empty my bladder (a retroverted uterus must be good for something).

The RE came in and that's when we had the "discussion". He fears for my egg quality, with slow stimming, 5 of 15 mature eggs disintergrating after retrivel, my age and dh's antibodies. The eggs I did get just didn't know what to do once they where embryos. At a 7 day transfer of what is developmentally a 5 day blast we have fallen out of sync. From what I've read late transfers are more likely negative and more likely result in a false chemical pregnancy. The RE didn't want to pin it solely on egg quality with only the results of one cycle and one tried protocol. He also said it could have just been a bad month to make those demands on my system.

So when (if) we got to round 2, it will be a different protocol to see if we can change the mix of maturation rates, egg quality and quantity.

Either way we transfered two blasts! The other 6 arrested, but we got two. We had one fully expanded average blast that was hatching and one partially expanded blast with a huge fragment in its middle. The transfer is similar to a pap smear without the nasty cotton swab, but then you have to lay with your butt up in the air for 1.5 hours. The scheduled my b-HCG test (blood pregnancy test) for next week Thursday.

Some people lay down for two days after transfer. That just wouldn't work for me, I would go nuts and its not proven to help or harm implantation. I was so hungry afterward dh let me choose lunch spot and we went to Seoul Garden with is a Asian (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) & Sushi bar. I didn't get to have beer or wine at all, which is what I planned for the failure of transfer. (I still have that bottle of Saki set aside for the 99% chance of a blood pregnancy test negative result.) We then went to the mall looking for games for the Wii and a Game Cube memory chip to save the Pikmin game to.

Officially I put my chances of pregnancy this cycle down to 20% versus the 60% I was anticipating before the morula issues popped up. On the bright side, we budgeted 10K for IVF and have only used 5.8K so far. Our insurance has covered $2000 in meds and about $1000 in labs/office visits. Another bonus is that we've paid one-quarter of that home equity line off already so we'll be in much better position for the second go round.

3 comments:

Aimee said...
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Aimee said...
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Aimee said...
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