Yesterday I gave an overview of what goes on with reproductive technology. Today I am going to bust out some jargon and tell you what I have been through.
Just to keep this a tad bit shorter, most cycles were a flop in terms of pregnancy, so I will likely only note if I actually got pregnant.
I have gone to multiple clinics, but for now, I won't tell you who they are, for better or worse. I'm in California, so like my cost of living, we will just agree that costs are high.
For the record, in IUIs they only want to see a few follicles since they can't control how many fertilize. This is how Jon and Kate made their 8.
April 2013 IUI#1--4 mature follicles
May 2013 IUI #2--3 mature follicles
June 2013--adopted a really ugly dog named Pepper who apparently was a baby-making machine before she got snipped. Unrelated, but pertinent as she is my warm cuddle buddy.
July 2013 IUI #3--2 mature follicles
Clearly IUI isn't working. We set up a consult for IVF for September 2013.
October 2013--planned one last IUI--5 follicles, no babies
December 2013--first IVF cycle. Testing in October showed that I have old lady ovaries, which wasn't revealed in early testing, so my haul is less than most. 7 eggs retrieved, 6 mature, 5 fertilized via ICSI. 2 good looking day 3 embryos transferred and one of the remaining made it to be frozen as a blastocyst.
First time ever pregnant, but it was so short I probably shouldn't have tried blinking. They call these chemical pregnancies.
February 2014, 9 eggs retrieved on Super Ovulation Sunday! (I guess the rest of the US was celebrating Super Bowl Sunday, but clearly they missed the real big event). 7 were mature and 6 fertilized. On day 3, we transferred 3 meh-looking embryos.
In good news, we got another frozen embryo to transfer. In bad news, not only did I not get pregnant, something funky was up as my WBC was all whack-a-doodle. Standard repetitive pregnancy lost testing didn't show any of the main offenders.
May 2014, first frozen embryos transfer cycle with the two freezer nuggets from previous cycles, and yet another chemical pregnancy. Meh.
I qualified for a free clinical trail at another clinic. Yes, free to me IVF. All I had to do was inject a mystery substance into my stomach for a month after transfer and pray for the best. For what it is worth, this class of drug was already FDA approved as safe for a completely different purpose, so it wasn't like I was expecting to look like a purple zebra or grow an extra kidney as a side effect.
July 2014 gives us fresh IVF cycle #3 with the clinical trial. I had 10 eggs retrieved, which felt like a serious winner winner chicken dinner for the old lady ovaries, but we only had 4 fertilized. Two were transferred on day 3, and two were frozen for a time to be determined (and in all honesty, I have still not yet determined that time).
I got pregnant for about 8 weeks this time (yay, mystery substance!)...and then had to have a d&c as my body didn't get the message it had a dead maybe-baby inside of it, also called a missed miscarriage.
That was not a fun period. It was a would-be-boy who didn't have a number of chromosomes that are compatible with life.
November 2014--attempted IVF that was cancelled due to communication errors at the clinic. I could ruminate on it and name drop, or I can move on and tell you they fessed up and refunded 100% of my money. We tried a last minute IUI to at least get something out of it, but IUIs don't work for me. That a proven fact at this point.
It hopefully goes without saying that I didn't go to that clinic again, though.
January 2015--another failed IVF cycle that was converted to an IUI due to lack of response. At this point I am frustrated that my body is not behaving and may never again.
I took off three months from the rat-race to give my body a break from all of the insanity. I also found a new clinic, and in April 2015, my husband bought me a rainbow unicorn.
Okay, it is *probably* not as good a unicorn, but he got a job that not only provided fertility insurance, but IVF coverage at that.
While we were fiddling around so insurance would be okay with how fast we were going to blow through our lifetime benefits, we did one last IUI in May 2015, just in case something amazing would happen ironically. Nothing ironic happened, but my lazy ovaries that didn't want to work 5 months before over-responded and they had to cut my meds off early to avoid a potential E + D + 6 situation.
To quote a young Anakin Skywalker, "Yippee!"
Earlier in the year I found an IVF clinic that had a different approach to stimulating my old lady ovaries, who, for the record, are named Hazel and Agnes. Their approach is minimal stimulation IVF (mini-IVF), so the amount of meds are similar to an IUI cycle. The otherwise standard approach to old lady ovary stimulation is to nuke them with high doses of meds, but I think it fried my eggs, as do some other women who have found better response with mini-IVF.
The deal with mini-IVF is you probably are going to do more than one retrieval cycle with embryo freezing, as less eggs=less blastocysts=less to transfer.
Fortunately, mini-IVF made me an ovum-acheiver.
In my first mini-IVF cycle in July 2015, I had 13 eggs retrieved and 6 blastocysts frozen. In August 2015 the 2nd mini-IVF resulted in 8 retrieved and 4 blastocyst frozen, as did number mini-IVF #3 in Dec 2015.
Go up and review that I used to have to have day 3 transfers due to fear of none making it to the blastocyst stage.
In between all of that, I had one genetically good (genetic testing is done at this clinic on my embryos) transferred on October 2015. She didn't stick.
And that's the way it goes in the womb of doom.
Here's my IVF summary~
10 embryos transferred, 3 pregnancies, no babies or even pregnancies long enough for baby-bumps. (Progesterone bloat...well, that's another thing.)
Of the 10 transferred, 7 were day 3 embryos, 2 were untested blastocysts (again, those day 5/6 embryos), and 1 was a genetically good blastocyst.
Currently in the freezers-
From July 2014 cycle, 2 day-3 embryos
From July 2015 cycle, 5 genetically tested blastocysts - 1 good, 4 questionable
From August 2015 cycle, 4 genetically tested blasts-1 good, 3 questionable
From December 2015 cycle, 4 biopsied and not-tested-yet blasts.
There is one more cycle that we have paid for but not gone though yet, and whatever comes from that batch gets tested with the potential ladies and gentlemen from the December cycle.
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