Fresh Never Frozen: First Embryo Report

Friday, May 25, 2012

First Embryo Report

The embryologist called this morning to inform us that all 6 mature embryos fertilized! We are thrilled with this news, but are still nervous about each of them making it through each day with good cell division. By day 3 last time, 3 of our 4 embryos had stopped dividing. Our specific ART (artificial reproductive treatment) is IVF with ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection), and the embryologist mentioned that the ICSI procedure had gone well. Picking out 6 perfect swimmers from a pool of 40 million is not a job that I would want! My sister asked if they play romantic music in the lab during this part of the process . . . ha, ha, they probably should!;) I felt really good today! My mom, daughter, and I even went out to lunch and shopping for a few hours to celebrate. I've only had about 12 pills to take today (ha, ha), so other than popping pills in the restaurant, it was an easy day to get away without worrying about a bringing a cooler full of syringes. Tomorrow more hormones will be added in order to get my uterus prepared for the embryo(s) to be put back in, so the "crazy lady" might pay a visit again.;) Overall, today was a good day on the IVF roller coaster and that's all I can do is take one day at a time!

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Our Infertility Journey

In 2007, right after our daughter was born via a very easy VBAC delivery (vaginal delivery after a c-section), we were wanting another baby. Not right away, but eventually.;) We really never prevented pregnancy and in 2009 we had a surprise pregnancy, followed shortly by an early miscarriage. This was my first miscarriage, so I was not too concerned since women seem to have them all the time. By 2010, after really "trying" to conceive nothing was happening. My ob/gyn prescribed a little clomid to get the ball rolling but nothing happened. Then, we added in several months of IUI's (aka artificial inseminations), which also never worked. We were feeling discouraged and did further testing to find out that my mister has a severely decreased morphology putting us in the 1% chance range of conceiving naturally. The summer of 2010 he had a varicocele repair surgery in an attempt to fix his problem. There is only a 50/50 success rate for the surgery and we ended up in the 50% that do not respond to the surgery. We took a break from everything for a while, had a 10 year anniversary trip to Maui with a little Clomid and got pregnant. At the 8 week ultrasound there was no longer a heartbeat and I miscarried for the second time. At the beginning of 2011, we decided to take things a step further and consult with specialists. We decided to pull out the big guns after being told we'd easily conceived doing IVF with ICSI with chromosomal screening. The IVF cycle was hard and didn't go as well as planned. We ended up with only one little boy embryo who was genetically perfect. We were thrilled at the news and even had positive pregnancy tests following a frozen embryo transfer. Shortly after, I miscarried for the third time. I got very depressed and had my first experience with situational depression. Months later after a visit with my doctor, a terrible visit with an adoption agency, the clouds lifted, and we decided to try IVF one last time. I knew there was no way I could do it a third time physically and we certainly couldn't do it again financially, so our second chance was our last chance. There were many set backs as we had to cancel the second cycle after discovering a suspicious (as in cancer suspicious) ovarian cyst right before preparations for our embryo retrieval. I had surgery and everything turned our fine, but we were feeling discouraged as the cancer scare was terrifying and we had to wait 4 months before returning our focus back to IVF round 2. Round 2 didn't go exactly as planned, but the end result included the transfer of two great looking embryos. I'm certain that I will hold a baby again one day, and only then will we be able to say that the journey was all worth it!