Here I go again on my own (but not really)

I never would have imagined a year ago that I would still be on this IVF rollercoaster.  I think it can be easy to fall down the infertility rabbit hole….  But this is our last, best effort.

The first time we did IVF, it felt like it made sense.  We tried to get pregnant for years.  I had a hormonal issue that caused me to release eggs late, I had an ectopic pregnancy (which caused scarring of one of my fallopian tubes), and I had a couple of miscarriages.  We did IVF to bypass most/all of the problems.  We implanted one decent-looking fresh day-5 blastocyst.  We had one perfect baby boy.  All the pieces fit.

We decided a few years later we wanted another kid.  IVF again.  One decent-looking fresh day-5 blastocyst.  Miscarriage.  One poor quality frozen blastocyst.  BFN.  One poor quality frozen blastocyst.  Miscarriage.  A sad unused B3 sitting in cold storage.  The whole process took most of a year. 

After our round of failures, we had to really sit down and think—do we want to keep doing this?  What are our real chances of success, and how much time, money, and emotional energy are we willing to spend?

We met with our doctor to discuss.  He suggested that our numerous miscarriages (four plus the ectopic) suggested we had poor egg quality.  (Or a genetic issue that leads to miscarriage, but we had blood tests and ruled that out.)  No surprise there.  He suggested another round of IVF might lead to the same outcome—a series of miscarriages.  We discussed a new option—genetic testing (specifically preimplantation genetic screening).  That involves genetically testing the day 5/6 blastocysts to make sure that they are “healthy” (ie. have the right number of chromosomes; it still does not test for structural abnormality).  There’s nothing “designer baby” about it.  We are not picking eye color, or hair color, or anything like that.  Well… in theory we could pick between a boy and a girl, but I’m not delusional enough to think that we’ll be lucky enough to end up with multiple genetically normal embryos.

Soooo we decided to give IVF one more try.  But with the caveat that, assuming it worked out, we planned to genetically test the day 5/6 blastocysts first.  We realized it was possible we’d end up with nothing to implant—that is, it was possible that we wouldn’t have any that make it to blastocyst, or that none of our blastocysts would end up being genetically normal, or that we would have a genetically normal one but that it would not survive the thaw.  But at least we could say we gave it our best shot and we could move on.

Of course things don’t always work out as we plan, which is how I begin my (hopefully last) two-week wait.

P.S. Note that the 5-day transfer for our third and last fresh cycle took place on what would have been the due date of our pregnancy from our fresh cycle (blighted ovum) almost a year ago.  I can’t help but think that’s some kind of good luck sign….