4dp5dt

I was feeling hopeful about this FET until this week turned into a complete disaster.

Wednesday night I fell asleep early and woke up nauseous, dizzy, confused and numb all over.  Thinking I was having a bad reaction to one of my meds, I went to the ER. 6 hours and 10 vials of blood later, nothing was wrong with me.  I still don’t know what happened, although my husband thinks it was a panic attack.  With the state my body was in, I can’t imagine it was good for my embryos.

Thursday afternoon I was going through my work bag and found a Ziploc bag with 2 little blue pills in it, meaning I completely forgot to take my Estrace at some point this week.  That can’t have been good for my lining.  I honestly would be shocked if that didn’t ruin the whole cycle.

Today is 4dp5dt and I am having period-like cramping. I know some say it is a good sign, but I have technically been pregnant 4 times before this and with none of those BFP’s did I get this type of cramping.  I normally get some very distinct poking feelings in my stomach, which are totally absent this time. I really want to test and get the disappointment over with, but I’m not in the mood to play the “is it a line?” game today.

Originally I was going to hold off until beta day to test, but I’m now thinking I’ll test on 7dp5dt. I know a BFN at that point isn’t going to change, and I’m working from home that day so I can take the day to cry and feel sorry for myself without having to put a smile on for anyone.

1dp5dt

As of yesterday I am PUPO with our final two embryos.  According to my RE they had good grades (Uh what? See previous post). The transfer itself went really well, no issues at all. On the way home we stopped for fries and my husband insisted on going to a different McDonald’s this time because he thought the one we stopped at on our way home from the first trasnfer was bad luck. He’s cute.

Last night I found myself googling “how soon after FET does implantation happen?” And it made me hate myself a little bit. The temptation to test at home is already strong because if it didn’t work at all I want to know as soon as possible rather than let my hopes build for another week.  But ultimately I know it is a bad idea. I think at most, maybe I will take a test the morning of my beta just so that I am not blindsided by the phone call.

I have to keep reminding myself that even though these were our last two embryos, it is not the end of the road if it doesn’t work. I have a contingency plan in place, and have already printed the medical records release form to get my files over to Dr. Braverman.

For now I will focus on the fact that tonight is the season premiere of American Horror Story! Eeeee!

Home stretch

Yesterday was my lining check.  I was at 9.2mm and triple stripe 6 days before transfer, so everything looked good. I sat down with my nurse after the scan to review my plan for the next week and I asked her to add in another blood draw for this Saturday, the day after I drop Estrace back down from 3 to 2 pills a day. She happily obliged, as they have for everything I have asked for recently. I feel like I am some kind of VIP at my RE’s office. Everything I ask for they say, “Sure, you’ve been through so much.”  I do feel like I have been through a lot but I also know that there have to be patients there who have been through even more. More cycles, more losses, more heartbreak.

Or maybe not, considering the type of women I have run into the past few times I’ve been there.  Last Saturday there was a woman loudly playing with her toddler while her husband waited in the car. I mean come on.  He couldn’t have kept the kid in the car with him? Yesterday there was a girl talking loudly about breastfeeding her child at home. Considering some of us may never get the chance to breastfeed any child at all, she could have kept that gem to herself.

But I digress.

So tonight I am to take my first dose of Neupogen. Up until this point I have put any medication in my body that had been thrown my way without a second thought, but I am a bit nervous about this one.  I guess because I read the scary portion of the side effects where it talks about ruptured spleens and anaphylaxis. I am going to try not to think about it because I know I will give myself a panic attack if I focus too much on it.

I need an attitude makeover.

My transfer is 13 days away and my attitude sucks.

I have zero hope this will work. I have already cried multiple times just thinking about the bad news I will receive on beta day. I have a pit in my stomach that grows by the day.  I am simply dreading this. I can’t talk to anyone about it because I know I will sound crazy.  How can you possibly know this is a failure before it has even happened? 

I just know.

I think I’ve searched every corner of the internet for stories like mine.  Suffice it to say, there aren’t very many.  And those that I have found, don’t exactly have happy endings.

It won’t work, I’ll have another chemical pregnancy, no embryos remaining, be out thousands of dollars, and probably get fucking cancer from the Neupogen.

FET Cycle #2 Begins Today

Today officially marked the start of our second FET cycle. After waiting to see if my insurance would authorize this cycle since my first cycle didn’t make it to transfer (it was a freeze-all for PGS), and getting the subsequent denial, we moved forward with baseline bloodwork and an ultrasound this morning.

Everything looked A-OK and the date is set.  On October 6, we will transfer our remaining two embryos. (Yes, my husband finally agreed that was the best course of action. Small victory!) Beta is set for 11 days after the transfer which is going to be an agonizing wait, considering I have decided I will not take any tests at home this time. Last cycle I tested every day (twice a day) from 5dp5dt through 9dp5dt and it almost drove me to the looney bin.  I am embarrassed to admit I actually carried the tests around with me, squinting at them in different lights trying to determine whether the line was getting darker. I simply can’t do that to myself again.

I wish I was excited about this.  Instead, I just have a pit in my stomach.  The thought of going through another chemical pregnancy is too much to take. I feel sick just thinking about waiting for the dreaded phone call on beta day.  I feel like I am hovering over a line right now – Am I someone who just had very bad luck with a PGS normal embryo last time? Or is there something wrong with me that NO ONE can figure out and renders me doomed to continue to have loss after loss?

If this cycle ends in another loss, I will know I fall into the latter category, and that is a scary place to be.  There are no hard and fast solutions for those in that category.  In that category, your success hinges on a stroke of GOOD luck for once. I have had zero good luck in the past two years, so you do the math on that one.

Making progress!

I closed the loop this week on my tour de RE’s and sat down once more with my current RE. We discussed what I learned from my meetings with the other 2 RE’s and what we’ll do moving forward.

I have a hysteroscopy scheduled with him for tomorrow which I am nervous about since it is an operative hysteroscopy and I will be under anesthesia. The whole anesthesia/surgery/risks thing has me on edge but I hope the procedure is productive. Part of me wishes that they will find something in there that will give some sort of “Ah ha!” but I know realistically there probably won’t be any answers gleaned from the procedure. At least it will give me an excuse to lay around the rest of the day – We just started watching American Horror Story, so maybe a Netflix binge will be in store for my recovery.

As far as next steps: After the hysteroscopy, I’m going straight into a mock FET cycle. Basically I will do everything I would do for an FET, just without the transfer. Instead, an endometrial biopsy will be taken towards the end of the cycle and sent off to Yale for their EFT test. It is my understanding this test will tell us more about the receptivity of my uterus/endometrium. If the results come back abnormal, my current RE will confer with my other RE at SIRM to decide a course of treatment.

I am also working on completing some bloodwork ordered by the RE at SIRM. This includes:

• Vitamin D (This already came back normal with a level of 54)
• TSH/Free T4/Thyroid Antibodies (Also came back normal)
• Natural Killer cells assay (To be completed next week)
• TH1/TH2 (Also to be completed next week)

I have a feeling these results are all going to come back normal, and then we’ll still have no answers. Once the results are all in, I’ll get together with the RE at SIRM again to discuss treatment for my next FET, which I am thinking will be something in the fall.

A New Chapter

Today began a new chapter in our journey. We attended a seminar for SIRM (Sher Institute of Reproductive Medicine), hoping to learn more about their practice and help us decide for certain whether we want to let them manage our care from here out. We already have a consultation scheduled with their medical director for later this month, but have not made any final decisions regarding where we will cycle next.

As soon as I learned my 4th pregnancy was not viable (Another chemical pregnancy, to be exact), I knew I wanted to explore a second opinion. While I like and respect my current RE greatly, he is a little “old school” in that he refuses to dabble in the reproductive immunology field. Being that we’ve already established that there are no chromosomal issues, blood clotting issues, or embryo abnormalities causing our losses at this point, I know that I need to explore something else.

So, that brought us to the SIRM seminar today. We were intrigued by the portion of the presentation about reproductive immunology, and the doctor who would be my RE gave an impressive talk. So far, I have a good feeling about him. We still need to figure out whether we want to bring our embryos to a brand new lab. My current RE warned me against being one of the first people to cycle with a new lab, and advised we wait until they have been up and running for a while first. So I want to proceed with caution in making this decision, considering we have just two embryos left and really want to avoid another fresh cycle.

I think my path will become a lot clearer over the next month as I have the consultation at SIRM, and a hysteroscopy which my current RE will perform next month.