Baby on the Brain (Again!)

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Here I sit, two years since doing IVF. This is so cliche, but it feels like a lifetime ago in some ways, but also like it just happened! After the successful cycle, I went on to have a fairly rough pregnancy. It’s a good thing it was so hard to get pregnant and that I wanted it so badly, because that made vomiting every day until I gave birth seem like a totally fair trade for getting a baby!

Ever since my son was born, until very recently, I really didn’t feel any desire to have another baby (or barfy pregnancy) any time soon! He has been amazing and I’ve loved the time we’ve had as our family of three. However, the baby hunger strikes when you least expect it, and now that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel of my master’s degree, and my child is more a toddler than a baby, I suddenly feel ready to try again!

This of course brings back the tidal wave of infertility-related emotions that I haven’t really dealt with since having my baby. The frustration of the inability to get pregnant like a normal person is heightened by the fact that we have to make a trip across the country where our embryos live to do the frozen embryo transfer (FET). However, having a successful pregnancy behind me, I am hopeful that this small sacrifice will result in the baby we are waiting for to join our family! Now it is just a matter of finding a clinic here in Houston who will take my insurance as a monitoring-only patient, finding the time off work to make the trip, coordinating the care for our son while we’re gone, etc. etc.!

I am excited and scared to take the plunge back in to the TTC world again! I hope our time here this time around is much shorter than the last!

A Christmas Miracle

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I got the best early Christmas present this week. Monday was the day of truth when I went in for the blood pregnancy test. It felt like the longest day of my life, but late that afternoon I got a call from one of the nurses telling me the results were positive and my hcg was around 850! I could hardly believe it. It’s still hard to believe. I went in for my second blood draw yesterday and got a call telling me that my hcg has more than doubled to 1760! I can now confidently say that I am pregnant. I will be 5 weeks tomorrow (according to the pregnancy app on my phone anyway).

I feel so incredibly blessed. I know that not everyone’s first (or second, or third) round of IVF results in pregnancy. Since my news earlier this week I’ve been so elated. But at the same time I’ve been thinking of the pain that others are still facing after many more months and years of heartache than I’ve experienced. You are constantly in my thoughts. I sincerely hope and pray that each of you will soon get the miracle that you have been waiting and working for.

It’s pretty early on to be posting about my pregnancy on the internet, but I figured that those who’ve been following along with me through this whole process should get to hear the results. Also, I know that there’s a lot that can still happen, and if anything goes wrong I’ll need all the support I can get.

I don’t plan on posting too many pregnancy updates on here since this blog is about infertility, but I may post from time to time to report if things are going well or not.

To everyone reading this: thank you so much. Thank you for your love, and thank you for your prayers. I’ve joked with my family that this baby is a community baby. So many friends and family have been there to get me through this whole IVF thing. I am so grateful for your love.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Freezer Babies!

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I got the call from my nurse yesterday that we have 8 little frozen embryos! With the one in my uterus (hopefully), that gives a grand total of 9 out of 14 making it to day 5. I am pretty thrilled about that. It’s comforting to know that if this cycle doesn’t work out, we’ll have plenty more embryos to try again. Although I’d like to think that they will just be waiting for when we’re ready to try for baby #2. Positive thinking, right?

In the meantime, I am just trying to not think about how many more days it will be until my pregnancy test!

Phase 5: Embryo Transfer

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Well, there is now a little embryo living in my uterus!

Except for getting stuck in traffic on the way, everything with the embryo transfer went smoothly. The doctor told me my embryo looks just like a picture from a textbook, and the embryologist said he or she is perfect! I love that she used “he or she” rather than “it.” That made it feel that much more real! When the embryologist handed me the picture of our embryo I just felt so overwhelmed with emotion. It’s crazy how attached I already feel. I’m so hopeful and prayerful that our little embaby will now implant and stay put.

As a side note, probably the most common question I’ve gotten from people during this process is how many embryos would we be transferring. Because I’m young and healthy, my doctor recommended we transfer only 1 embryo. Doing a transfer on day 5 as opposed to day 3 allows the strongest embryos to continue to grow and makes it clear which ones are best for implantation. Those that don’t continue growing past day 3 are much less likely to have resulted in a pregnancy, so the “bad” embryos are weeded out, and the need to transfer more than 1 embryo to “up your odds” is gone. Of course, each patient is different, so what’s right for one may not be right for another. But for us, we felt confident in the doctor’s recommendation. If this cycle fails, he may recommend that we transfer 2 next time. If you are interested, here is some information about the success rates of single vs multiple embryo transfers at my clinic.

In the meantime, the lab will continue to monitor our other embryos until they reach the ideal point to freeze. Then I’ll get a call in a day or two telling me how many freezer babies we have.

Now the dreaded two week wait begins. I have finals coming up so hopefully that will keep me busy (although I’m a little worried about my ability to actually focus on finals). Then next week I leave town to go home for Christmas, so I’ll be doing my pregnancy test at a lab in Phoenix. It’s going to be so hard not to just pee on a stick at home, but I know I need to be patient and wait for the blood test!

Fertilization Report

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This morning I got a wake up call from my RE, and his news was worth being woken up for! Of my 14 eggs retrieved yesterday, all 14 were mature and fertilized and are growing normally! He told me that in a typical cycle, about 70% of the eggs are mature and fertilized, so I am in his words “ahead of the curve.” I am so excited and grateful that things are going the way they should so far. I’ll get another call tomorrow, and as long as the embryos are continuing to grow as expected we will do a day 5 blastocyst transfer on Wednesday. Until then, we will pray for our little embabies to keep growing, and for my uterus to get nice and fluffy for implantation time. I know we’re not out of the woods yet, but it is very encouraging to get good news like this. I just hope it keeps on coming!

Phase 4: Egg Retrieval

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Today was the big egg retrieval day! For those of you unfamiliar with this process, I was put under anesthesia for about 30 minutes so the doctor could use an ultrasound-guided needle to retrieve the fluid from each follicle on my ovaries while the embryologist checks for eggs. The whole process went very smoothly and took about 15 minutes total I think. I spent the majority of the time at the surgical center in the recovery room trying to wake up from the anesthesia. Before we left the office, they told us that 14 eggs were retrieved!

Also, a friend from church brought us dinner tonight! It was so nice to have someone thinking of us. This whole infertility thing is so much more bearable with support.

Tomorrow I’ll get a call telling me how many eggs were fertilized, and then I’ll get updates on how the embryos are growing every day or so! I can’t wait to find out how many little embabies we are going to have!

Days 6 and 7 aka a Party in my Ovaries

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Things are still chugging along quite nicely. I’ve been to the doctor’s office for monitoring every morning since last Thursday, and I’m pretty certain that will continue to be the case until I trigger. Today my follicles were measuring between 13-15mm! They are getting so big so fast! The sonographer told me it’s a party in my ovaries. I’m expecting to trigger between tomorrow and Wednesday which would give me an egg retrieval between Wednesday and Friday. It’s crazy how fast everything is happening!

As far as drugs go, I’ve been doing a Cetrotide injection in the mornings, and Gonal-F and Menopur at night. The Menopur takes 2 shots to get the full dose so that makes a total of 4 shots in a day. And if you want to count the daily blood draw, then that is 5 needles being stuck in my body a day! For someone who has mild needle anxiety, I feel pretty proud of myself.

For the first couple days I didn’t really notice any side effects from the drugs, but I’ve started to feel ’em now. The main things I’ve noticed are trouble sleeping at night/fatigue during the day, headaches, bloating, and an itchy rash from the Cetrotide. And soreness in the zone where my ovaries live. The weirdest thing though is that I’ve felt way more absentminded than usual and have had trouble remembering things. I guess I don’t know that’s for sure coming from the drugs, but usually my memory is pretty solid so I’m just guessing. Anyone else experience this? I’ve heard of “pregnancy brain” before, so I’m just going to call this “IVF brain.” Sounds legit, right? Tonight I had my first meltdown of the cycle crying about how my brain no longer works. It was frustrating but funny at the same time.

So far this has been a crazy but good experience. I hope the crazy part goes away soon, and the good part stays permanently!

 

Day 5 Monitoring aka Expect the Unexpected

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I went in for more monitoring this morning. The sonographer told me I have 8 follicles on one side and 9 on the other, all measuring between 9-12mm. She told me to schedule a Sunday morning monitoring appointment and to cancel the one that I originally had made for tomorrow.

This afternoon I got my follow up call. Surprise surprise, they want me to come back tomorrow instead of Sunday. But by the time I got the call it was too late to schedule an appointment and since the one I already had was cancelled, I now have to go first thing tomorrow morning and wait until they can fit me in. So lesson learned, don’t cancel any monitoring appointments. Typical IVF cycles start out with every other day monitoring but apparently mine is every day. Which is fine, I can’t complain that things are working quickly. Tonight I keep my Gonal-F at 37.5, up my Menopur to 112, and add Cetrotide. That means three injections tonight! Yipee! Then starting tomorrow I do Cetrotide in the mornings and the other two at night. So many shots, so little time. I’m excited to see how things look tomorrow.

Day 4 Monitoring

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Today I went in for my first bloodwork/ultrasound appointment since starting injections on Monday. It was a quick and easy and I scheduled my next appointment for Saturday morning.

This afternoon I got a call from one of the nurses telling me that my estrogen levels actually look pretty high for this early on in the cycle. Tonight I will take half my usual dose of Gonal-F, and then go in tomorrow for monitoring rather than Saturday. She said I am going to have very active ovaries. Hopefully that is a good thing!