The New Plan

On Friday morning, we had our post IVF follow up appointment.  Apparently the whole office was just as shocked as we were that the first round didn't result in a pregnancy.  Our doctor made the comment that we were the last people he thought wouldn't get pregnant.  I think we left them scratching their heads a bit and proving once again that the IVF process, no matter how perfect it goes, is not 100% full proof.

As the nurse took my stats and asked me what medication I had leftover, I started saying lots of if type statements.  She stopped and looked at me saying "This will work," several times.  Apparently they don't say this kind of thing to everyone.

Then we met with the doctor and talked about how beautifully our first round of IVF went (up until the negative pregnancy test part).  He was pleased with all of our numbers and how great our embryos looked.  He expressed his shock that it didn't work.  Apparently the embryos either stopped growing, didn't hatch, or didn't attach.  IVF takes care of the first 7 steps of pregnancy, but it's up to your body to do the last 3 steps.  There's no way for them to know how far the embryos did or didn't make it.  For some reason it was comforting to know they were as shocked as we were about everything even though there was no explainable reason why it didn't work.

After this part we formulated a new game plan for the next round.  Thankfully they were able to freeze 2 healthy blastocysts from our first egg retrieval, so this time around we can do a frozen embryo transfer (FET).  This is a way less intense form of IVF because there is no ovary stimulation which means there is no egg retrieval.  We were very relieved to hear that this would be an option for us because of how hard the egg retrieval was on my body.  I will still have to do shots but they're basically to make sure the lining is thick enough to support a pregnancy.  We will show up on the preselected day in July and do the transfer.  This time around I won't still be healing from the retrieval.

We are hoping things will be different this time around and these babies will be the ones.  On our first cycle they put back 3 day embryos and let the rest continue to grow in the lab.  On day 5 we had two strong blastocysts so they froze those for us.  Hopefully we will see a difference with 5 day ones.  Before we left the doctor reminded us that we've gotten pregnant on our own before so it will happen again.