Here We Go Again

I went in for my regroup today and decisions have been made. Brian and I are moving forward with IVF #2. 

Dr. S talked me through the sad state of our embryos. All but one of our original ten frozen embryos were graded 4AA or 5AA. The other was a 4AB. It's a bit of a mystery as to why we have had such a dismal thaw rate since slow-frozen embryos should survive thaw about 85% of the time, not 50%. The embryo that we last transferred had about a 15% cell loss which also seems crappy for such a highly graded blast. He gave us about a 5% chance of success with our remaining two based on everything we've been through. That's so crazy to me because no one, not even our doctors and embryologists, thought we would end up here. We should have had success by now.

His recommendation is to do a fresh cycle with PGD. Since that doubles the cost, and because I'm (perhaps naively) not convinced that there's a major genetic problem preventing us from getting pregnant, we're going to move forward with a fresh IVF minus the PGD. (For those who don't know, PGD involves biopsying your embryos to look for chromosomal and genetic defects.) Next steps include a bunch of day three tests to check my egg health and an updated SA for Brian. When I was 28 and doing this the first time my AMH level was stellar at 6.3 and I had 29 resting follicles. My AMH was tested in January and somehow climbed to 7.5. Dr. S said that's pretty unusual, but hopefully indicates that I'll still have a good number next month. Our overall success last time with producing high quality blasts was considered extremely positive (his exact words were something like "we almost never see results like that"), so I hope 4.5 years of aging won't impact us too much. It's all so scary starting over. I really never thought it would come to this.

Now that there's some semblance of a plan started, I feel a little better. My goal is to enjoy the holidays while we take a forced break from actively trying. I really do love this time of year, and I fully realize how lucky I already am to have a son to celebrate it all with. I'm really looking forward to a full week off at Thanksgiving and two weeks at Christmas to spend lots of quality time with the fam. Gotta love the school calendar! 

Thank you to all of you who offered love and support on my previous post. This process sometimes really takes the life out of me, and this is the best place I have to vent. I'm sorry if anyone thought I was being too self-pitying and super annoying. I really have been a Debbie Downer lately. No fun. I'll be better, I promise.