Fresh Never Frozen: IVF "Hardly" Day 1

Friday, May 11, 2012

IVF "Hardly" Day 1

Today is officially IVF Cycle Day 1! Don't be fooled by the title though, things have been under way for weeks. The three weeks leading up to this have included oral medications, lab work, ultra sounds, a doppler study, a trial embryo transfer, nursing consults, phone calls with the IVF pharmacy back east, cryopreserving some of my hubby's swimmers, acupuncture, and a hysteroscopy (which mine was actually done during my surgery 6 weeks ago). For anyone that thinks you walk into an IVF clinic and walk out glowing with pregnancy, you couldn't be more wrong! Cycle Day 1 is really more of a calm day before the storm. My only medications today are continuing prescription strength prenatal vitamins (hooray, we found some that don't completely shut down my bowels;)), folgard, and beginning dexamethasone (I'm already ravenous and insatiable after one dose). Tomorrow morning is actually a big day when I go in at 7:30 am on a Saturday for an ultrasound and blood work. If the ultrasound and estradiol levels are favorable, we get a "green light" to move forward with this cycle. This is a nerve wracking day for me, because in January this was the day we got a devastating "red light" when a cyst was discovered. . . the cycle was canceled, over $6,000 worth of meds were put in my closet in hopes we might eventually get to use them before they expire, and our focus had to shift from baby making to my health. Cycle Day 2 is a big deal!;)

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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!