Getting Back on Track
I've decided that I don't want to write two travel blog entries in a row, so you will have to wait a bit longer for my tales of beautiful Bermuda.
Instead, since I feel compelled to write a post in the last days of every year, I will write about more of my medical journey to motherhood. Yes, I know I'm already a mother, but that had a nice ring to it. This will be my one (and hopefully only) IVF post. And away we go...
May-August 2017
Directly following the April 2017 miscarriage, I was determined that I would get pregnant within a few months without medical intervention. I had this misguided notion that the miscarriage reset my body and now everything would work really smoothly, and BAM, instant pregnancy. This did not happen, and I became more and more despondent.
September 2017
I finally gave in and called Strong Fertility to set up an appointment for myself. Their first new patient appointment wasn't until November. Boo.
November 2017
I finally went to see my new specialist at Strong Fertility. She had me go get bloodwork, and she had Mike give another sperm sample, and I wouldn't get the results until December.
December 2017
We went in to see the doctor about our results and future plans. My bloodwork came out fine, and I did an HSG, a procedure where they put dye into my fallopian tubes and uterus to see if they were blocked. No blockages. Mike's sperm sample showed all is good except a little (big) problem where his sperm morphology is 0% normal. The doctor tells us THAT is an issue. We were wanting to do IUI, a procedure where they just time everything exactly right and then let the sperm do it's own thing, but my doctor told us that IUI will likely not work for a morphology issue like that. She suggested IVF, but I didn't want the time or the hassle, so I told her since insurance will pay for IUI, we may as well try that first. She acquiesced, but I could tell she thought it was a waste of time.
January 2018
We prepared for our first IUI with me taking a med called Clomid to help me produce large eggs. From my own charting, my ovulation day was supposed to be around the 22nd of January. The doctor called the 20th and told me I was ovulating. It was very bad timing, as that is Simon's birthday and we were heading out to his birthday party. So the IUI was cancelled for that month.
February 2018
I should have started to realize by this point that the fertility process is a patience game, but I was out of patience. The doctor was going to do another IUI in February but I had a cyst leftover from the clomid (that happens sometimes) and they had to put me on birth control to get rid of it. It was a huge cyst, and the birth control got rid of it within 3 days, so I highly recommend using it for ovarian cysts. But I was not happy with the delay.
March 2018
Our first real IUI was this month. Mike's sample looked good (they can't test morphology that way but his count and speed were good), and my egg was the right size. They inserted a small tube into my uterus with Mike's sample in it, had me lay back on a table for about 10 mins, and that was that. I definitely got my hopes up, and of course the pregnancy blood test came back negative.
April 2018
More birth control. Yay. I just wanted to get on with things.
May 2018
Time for our second IUI. We did the same thing as the first time. The timing for my ovulation kept feeling "off" but I was just following doctors' orders. Another negative pregnancy test. We had our followup appointment with the doctor, and she suggested going right to IVF. I was over IUI at this point and just said yes. It helped that I had new insurance in 2018 that covered most IVF costs.
June 2018
This is where it starts to get exciting. My egg retrieval was set for the end of June. This is a wonderful thing where they pump me full of meds (mostly injections in my belly) and then see how many eggs I produce for them to take out of me and fertilize. I ended up producing 15 eggs, and 11 of them fertilized after my procedure, which I was HEAVILY medicated for and remember almost nothing from. The doctor told me that there was a chance of me getting this syndrome called OHSS because I produced a lot of eggs, so they wouldn't let me do a fresh transfer (where they don't freeze the embryo, they just put it back in a few days later). I was a little let down, but Mike and I had decided to do genetic testing on our embryos anyway, because of the miscarriage and his morphology issues, which means we needed to freeze them, so it wasn't a huge loss. Here is my beautiful medicine calendar for the month of June. Don't even try to figure it all out.
July 2018
We had another followup appointment with the doctor to discuss the results of our genetic analysis. She tells us that it was a good thing that we decided to do the genetic testing, because only 2 out of 11 embryos were normal. All of the rest were unusable (too many or too few chromosomes), save one that was unable to be tested for some reason, and another that was only 20% abnormal, which I guess means they produce normal babies some of the time. We didn't like those numbers, but we decided to implant one normal embryo and go from there.
August 2018
I decided to have a "natural" IVF cycle, which means almost no meds, and I was gonna rely on my own body hormones to carry this baby. I told my doctor that I ovulate normally every month, which I do, because I'd been tracking it for a long time trying to have another baby. So I thought this would be no problem. The doctor would just track my ovulation, and transfer the embryo when my body was ready. It seemed as if we did just that, but, just like the IUIs, the point in time when the doctor said I was ovulating didn't seem like when *I* thought I was ovulating. But even if the timing was a little bit off, I thought it could still work. It did seem like my LH level was behaving strangely though, with a large spike when my egg wasn't ready (the egg they use to determine ovulation time, but not related to the embryo) and then a steady decrease when it was supposed to be increasing. The doctors didn't seem concerned by this, so we forged ahead. They transfered embryo #5 in mid August.
September 2018
I could have sworn that I was pregnant. Apparently, it was the supplemental progesterone they gave me "just in case". It's an evil thing that it causes all the same symptoms as pregnancy. I finally couldn't handle it anymore and took a home test the day before my blood test. It was negative, and I was devastated. Luckily we had planned a weekend trip to see Mike's brother, and that took my mind off of things.
October 2018
I was finally starting to feel at peace with the fact that maybe we just wouldn't have any more children. Simon is great, and I was feeling lucky to have him in my life. But we had one more normal embryo, so my doctor asked if maybe we could do a "medicated" IVF cycle this time, just in case my body is not as regular as I thought it was. This kind of IVF protocol shuts down all of my normal hormonal processes, and they feed me exact amounts of all of the hormones I will need. I agreed to this plan, and shortly thereafter I got a 4-page letter detailing all of the medicine I was to take at which times every day. In early October, I took a small amount of birth control and lupron to quiet my system, and then in late October I started with an injection of progesterone in the morning, estrogen pills in the morning, estrogen pills in the afternoon, estrogen pills in the evening, low-dose aspirin in the evening, and more progesterone (not an injection) before bed.
November 2018
I had my transfer of embryo #10 on November 2nd. The week after that I took a trip to NYC to see coworkers and friends, and I felt tired and out of it, but I attributed that to the meds. I also fell asleep on a 30 minute car trip, which I thought was odd, but still didn't want to get my hopes up. I didn't even bother taking a home test, because I didn't want to see the finality of that negative test, since this was basically our last shot at a baby. On November 12th I took my blood pregnancy test, and the result was POSITIVE!! I couldn't believe it. I wasn't about to get excited yet, so I waited until my 2nd and 3rd blood tests, which were also great numbers. Wow, we may actually have pulled this off...
December 2018
I was still refusing to get excited until my first ultrasound, remembering all too well my miscarriage. We had the ultrasound on December 3rd, and there was a little baby in there, and it was very healthy! It had a heart rate of 146 bpm and all the markers were good. NOW, I was excited. But I wanted to be sure that the baby was gonna STAY healthy, so I scheduled another ultrasound for December 21st. The baby was big, healthy, and a heart rate of 169!! I'm now at 11 weeks, and feeling very positive about this pregnancy. The last bit of good news is that we can find out the gender any time we want, since that's another feature of the genetic testing. The doctor had told us that we had one boy and one girl with our normal embryos. We are thinking of finding out around Simon's birthday.
This past year was crazy, but we did it, with the help of many medical professionals. (Oh, and if you read this before mid-January 2019: shhhhh to the general public.)
I hope everyone had a great holiday season, and Happy New Year to us all.
Instead, since I feel compelled to write a post in the last days of every year, I will write about more of my medical journey to motherhood. Yes, I know I'm already a mother, but that had a nice ring to it. This will be my one (and hopefully only) IVF post. And away we go...
May-August 2017
Directly following the April 2017 miscarriage, I was determined that I would get pregnant within a few months without medical intervention. I had this misguided notion that the miscarriage reset my body and now everything would work really smoothly, and BAM, instant pregnancy. This did not happen, and I became more and more despondent.
September 2017
I finally gave in and called Strong Fertility to set up an appointment for myself. Their first new patient appointment wasn't until November. Boo.
November 2017
I finally went to see my new specialist at Strong Fertility. She had me go get bloodwork, and she had Mike give another sperm sample, and I wouldn't get the results until December.
December 2017
We went in to see the doctor about our results and future plans. My bloodwork came out fine, and I did an HSG, a procedure where they put dye into my fallopian tubes and uterus to see if they were blocked. No blockages. Mike's sperm sample showed all is good except a little (big) problem where his sperm morphology is 0% normal. The doctor tells us THAT is an issue. We were wanting to do IUI, a procedure where they just time everything exactly right and then let the sperm do it's own thing, but my doctor told us that IUI will likely not work for a morphology issue like that. She suggested IVF, but I didn't want the time or the hassle, so I told her since insurance will pay for IUI, we may as well try that first. She acquiesced, but I could tell she thought it was a waste of time.
January 2018
We prepared for our first IUI with me taking a med called Clomid to help me produce large eggs. From my own charting, my ovulation day was supposed to be around the 22nd of January. The doctor called the 20th and told me I was ovulating. It was very bad timing, as that is Simon's birthday and we were heading out to his birthday party. So the IUI was cancelled for that month.
February 2018
I should have started to realize by this point that the fertility process is a patience game, but I was out of patience. The doctor was going to do another IUI in February but I had a cyst leftover from the clomid (that happens sometimes) and they had to put me on birth control to get rid of it. It was a huge cyst, and the birth control got rid of it within 3 days, so I highly recommend using it for ovarian cysts. But I was not happy with the delay.
March 2018
Our first real IUI was this month. Mike's sample looked good (they can't test morphology that way but his count and speed were good), and my egg was the right size. They inserted a small tube into my uterus with Mike's sample in it, had me lay back on a table for about 10 mins, and that was that. I definitely got my hopes up, and of course the pregnancy blood test came back negative.
April 2018
More birth control. Yay. I just wanted to get on with things.
May 2018
Time for our second IUI. We did the same thing as the first time. The timing for my ovulation kept feeling "off" but I was just following doctors' orders. Another negative pregnancy test. We had our followup appointment with the doctor, and she suggested going right to IVF. I was over IUI at this point and just said yes. It helped that I had new insurance in 2018 that covered most IVF costs.
June 2018
This is where it starts to get exciting. My egg retrieval was set for the end of June. This is a wonderful thing where they pump me full of meds (mostly injections in my belly) and then see how many eggs I produce for them to take out of me and fertilize. I ended up producing 15 eggs, and 11 of them fertilized after my procedure, which I was HEAVILY medicated for and remember almost nothing from. The doctor told me that there was a chance of me getting this syndrome called OHSS because I produced a lot of eggs, so they wouldn't let me do a fresh transfer (where they don't freeze the embryo, they just put it back in a few days later). I was a little let down, but Mike and I had decided to do genetic testing on our embryos anyway, because of the miscarriage and his morphology issues, which means we needed to freeze them, so it wasn't a huge loss. Here is my beautiful medicine calendar for the month of June. Don't even try to figure it all out.
July 2018
We had another followup appointment with the doctor to discuss the results of our genetic analysis. She tells us that it was a good thing that we decided to do the genetic testing, because only 2 out of 11 embryos were normal. All of the rest were unusable (too many or too few chromosomes), save one that was unable to be tested for some reason, and another that was only 20% abnormal, which I guess means they produce normal babies some of the time. We didn't like those numbers, but we decided to implant one normal embryo and go from there.
August 2018
I decided to have a "natural" IVF cycle, which means almost no meds, and I was gonna rely on my own body hormones to carry this baby. I told my doctor that I ovulate normally every month, which I do, because I'd been tracking it for a long time trying to have another baby. So I thought this would be no problem. The doctor would just track my ovulation, and transfer the embryo when my body was ready. It seemed as if we did just that, but, just like the IUIs, the point in time when the doctor said I was ovulating didn't seem like when *I* thought I was ovulating. But even if the timing was a little bit off, I thought it could still work. It did seem like my LH level was behaving strangely though, with a large spike when my egg wasn't ready (the egg they use to determine ovulation time, but not related to the embryo) and then a steady decrease when it was supposed to be increasing. The doctors didn't seem concerned by this, so we forged ahead. They transfered embryo #5 in mid August.
September 2018
I could have sworn that I was pregnant. Apparently, it was the supplemental progesterone they gave me "just in case". It's an evil thing that it causes all the same symptoms as pregnancy. I finally couldn't handle it anymore and took a home test the day before my blood test. It was negative, and I was devastated. Luckily we had planned a weekend trip to see Mike's brother, and that took my mind off of things.
October 2018
I was finally starting to feel at peace with the fact that maybe we just wouldn't have any more children. Simon is great, and I was feeling lucky to have him in my life. But we had one more normal embryo, so my doctor asked if maybe we could do a "medicated" IVF cycle this time, just in case my body is not as regular as I thought it was. This kind of IVF protocol shuts down all of my normal hormonal processes, and they feed me exact amounts of all of the hormones I will need. I agreed to this plan, and shortly thereafter I got a 4-page letter detailing all of the medicine I was to take at which times every day. In early October, I took a small amount of birth control and lupron to quiet my system, and then in late October I started with an injection of progesterone in the morning, estrogen pills in the morning, estrogen pills in the afternoon, estrogen pills in the evening, low-dose aspirin in the evening, and more progesterone (not an injection) before bed.
November 2018
I had my transfer of embryo #10 on November 2nd. The week after that I took a trip to NYC to see coworkers and friends, and I felt tired and out of it, but I attributed that to the meds. I also fell asleep on a 30 minute car trip, which I thought was odd, but still didn't want to get my hopes up. I didn't even bother taking a home test, because I didn't want to see the finality of that negative test, since this was basically our last shot at a baby. On November 12th I took my blood pregnancy test, and the result was POSITIVE!! I couldn't believe it. I wasn't about to get excited yet, so I waited until my 2nd and 3rd blood tests, which were also great numbers. Wow, we may actually have pulled this off...
December 2018
I was still refusing to get excited until my first ultrasound, remembering all too well my miscarriage. We had the ultrasound on December 3rd, and there was a little baby in there, and it was very healthy! It had a heart rate of 146 bpm and all the markers were good. NOW, I was excited. But I wanted to be sure that the baby was gonna STAY healthy, so I scheduled another ultrasound for December 21st. The baby was big, healthy, and a heart rate of 169!! I'm now at 11 weeks, and feeling very positive about this pregnancy. The last bit of good news is that we can find out the gender any time we want, since that's another feature of the genetic testing. The doctor had told us that we had one boy and one girl with our normal embryos. We are thinking of finding out around Simon's birthday.
This past year was crazy, but we did it, with the help of many medical professionals. (Oh, and if you read this before mid-January 2019: shhhhh to the general public.)
I hope everyone had a great holiday season, and Happy New Year to us all.
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