A bit of a Rant!

Great news... 16 retrieved, 11 mature and 9 Fertilized!!!! 

Not so great news. 1st the embryologist told me she was scheduling me for a day 5, then I had to tell her no no I'm an all-freeze. Then she asked me why and I told her to check out my uterus. Ok, here's the not so great part of the call, and you all might think I'm weird, but after all these IUIs and the 1st IVF and 1st FET, I'm tired of hearing it. She said that I make beautiful embryos, that she even looked at my report from my 1st IVF and couldn't understand why I wasn't pregnant yet. So here's my issue...since I started down this road of single-motherhood (in other words all medically supervised) and its been 19 months, I've been told this will be easy. "you're so fertile", "your numbers are amazing" "your ovaries have no clue that you are forty" So I was cocky for the first 1/2 a year, especially when I got pregnant with the 1st and 2nd IUIs once I moved to my RE. But its been exactly a year yesterday(lovely timing right) since my D&C for my last pregnancy/miscarriage. And I haven't been pregnant since. 

So I'm tired of hearing how great my ovaries are, how amazing my embryos look, how fertile I am. 

Just get me pregnant already!!!! 

Ok done with my rant. 

I'm truly happy that I potentially have 9 new embryos to freeze. That gives me (maybe) 16 to work with doing FETs, before I move on. And I truly believe that somewhere in these beautiful embryos is my child!

Summer 2014

So I've done the math and this is what I know.  By July 2014 I will either be a mom, be pregnant or be on the list waiting for a call from the Westside Children's Center about a child needing a home.  So that means I could be a mom by next July!!!  I want to say I will but not knowing how I'm going to get there is kinda of an obstacle.

So how do I know this.  Well I just started my last cycle of IVF.  Meaning this is the last cycle of stims I will be doing and the last time I will be retrieving eggs for transfer.  Oh and the last time I had to pick up the canister of my Sperm Donor.  If my ovaries respond as well this time as they did the last time then the most frozen embryos I will have moving forward is 19 (7 leftover from my last cycle and 12 new ones from this one).  If I were to transfer 3 at a time then the most transfers I can do is 4 ( 3/3 and the final one I would transfer all 4).  Therefore by the Spring if I'm not pregnant that I'm officially moving onto foster to adopt!!!!  I had a meeting last week with the head of foster to adopt at Westside Children's Center and it went great.  The guy was extremely helpful and supportive.  I've decided that I will start taking the training class in January regardless of where I am in my FET process.  I just keep moving this train forward.

I do still believe that this will work.  That I will get pregnant!!!!  But I wanted to learn about the process whether its for baby #1 or baby #2 or even both.  It helps me get through the bad months thinking about what I can do instead of the bad.  Not sure if that makes sense, but it does make sense to me.

So night 2 of stims in the books, blood test tomorrow and then we will see.

Here I go again...and again...and again

Yup, I'm back and still not pregnant.  But I feel good, well almost good.  My Dr. and I have a new protocol in the works for this IVF (which will be my last).  I will still have FETs to do, as I have 7 frozen embryos at the moment and will hopefully add to that number with the current cycle.  Our goal with this cycle is to improve the quality of my eggs even if this means lowering the amount of eggs we retrieve.  So a slower cycle of meds and adding Growth Hormone as well.  I feel like even though my body and ovaries have acting younger then their years, both in response to hormones and recovery times, the truth is I'm 40, yup 40, almost 41, so maybe we need to do a few things that get done for that older crowd I'm a part of.
So Growth Hormone, and yes same thing A-Rod is getting, oh wait nothing's happening to him yet. Anyway, the idea behind the GH is to help the cells in my eggs do what they are supposed to do throughout the retrieval and growth process.  Also we are going to do co-culture, what that means is that normally the egg is removed from the follicle it grows in and placed in a petrie dish with sperm.  In the case of co-culture, the egg is kept with the cells that surround it while in the follicle throughout the fertilization process.  Also adding in assisted Hatching (AH).  After my first IVF, my embryologist called to tell my how well my embryos looked and mentioned because I was over 40 they would do AH, but then she called me back 5 minutes later to say, oops, no AH.  Why?  Because they only do AH, when there are 10 or less embryos and of course I had 12.  Well shit, I'm still over 40, but that was the rule.  So this time I asked my RE about AH and said I'm still over 40 and he smiled and said yes, we will do AH this time!!!!!!!

So I've ordered all my meds and I'm back on BCP till next weekend.  I have my next u/s on Monday to make sure we are ready to go for next weekend.  Egg retrieval is tentatively scheduled for August 28th, one day before the 1 year anniversary of my miscarriage.  Not sure how I feel about that, but I guess I'll find out.  This cycle might be a freeze all, to allow my body to snap back and relax after the stims, but we will see.

That's it for now.

Thanks for reading.