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Monday, June 24, 2013

IVF Update

This whole experience has been amazing. I was listing off to Ben all of the great things that have happened to us during this process and the list was huge. Everyone and everything has gone so well. The nurses have gone out of their way to call and check up on me often, they thoroughly answer my questions, they take care of Lucy during my appointments, they combined my medications so that I only had to give myself three shots a day instead of four, and they are so sweet. The front desk has helped so much with my scheduling because they knew I had to drive over an hour to get to them. The whole staff is so talented and amazing. They know Ben, Lucy, and I by name. I have been so pleased with the experience.

We were so confident that this was going to work that we bought this beauty:

 Actually, we bought it because we really needed a second car and we've been saving up for a while for it. But it is fun to imagine it being filled with IVF babies one day.


Anywho, by the time my egg retrieval came, I was exhausted from the medications. My stomach was bruised all over. My insides hurt. I was emotional. As soon as they removed all of those massive follicles (around 22mm each) I felt so free and liberated. I was so happy.  They can remove anywhere from 6 to 30 eggs. The average is 10-14 eggs. They retrieved 21 from me! It was so exciting to hear. 5 were immature so that left us with 16. Then only 11 fertilized. Then 2 days later we lost 4 more. Then 2 days later we lost another one. Then we lost 4 more.

So on embryo transfer day they had 2 good embryos to transfer. My "unexplained" infertility is no longer unexplained. The quality of my eggs is clearly low. Out of 21 eggs we should of had about 10 good embryos but we only had 2. We are so grateful that we had at least those 2. The doctors would have never been able to find that out about my eggs without doing IVF. And IVF is probably the only way for us to get pregnant again, so I am so grateful that we decided to do this. We have felt so good throughout this whole process so to hear such terrible news was disheartening. However, we know that this is what we're supposed to do, so we are hoping that we'll be successful in the end.

Right before the embryo transfer


Despite having 19 bad egg/embryos, these 2 were perfect. These 2 blastocysts (spell check wants me to change it to blastoffs) may one day be our children. 


 That bright white dot is our potential babies.

Now we wait. The dreaded wait. It's making me go crazy. No matter what happens, I know we did the right thing. I have faith in Heavenly Father's plan for us. I know that he has something amazing in store for us, whether it comes in the form of a successful IVF or not.