Back in Vegas

I flew back to Vegas last night for my 10am monitoring appointment today. It was nice to have the week at home, and the flight is only about 80 minutes. I will say, flying to Vegas on a Friday night flight is interesting. The girl next to me and the girl across the aisle spent the whole flight doing their makeup so they could go party as soon as they landed.

Which put me in an interesting spot - the girl next to me was wearing a tiny leopard print mini, black patent heels, and tons of inexpensive jewelry. I was trying to figure out how to strike up a conversation to see if Vegas was work or pleasure (if you know what I mean), so when she started putting on her makeup I commented that she had a lot more stamina that I did as I was looking forward to going to sleep as soon as I got (back) to my hotel. Turned out she was in town for a going away party weekend with friends. Glad I didn't ask my original question... ;)

So the monitoring appointment. I could tell over the past few days that something was growing, as I've had the bloated feeling that comes with stims as they do their thing. Unfortunately, only one ovary is doing anything - three follicles 15mm-7mm. It seems unlikely the 7mm one will catch up sufficiently, so my guess is we get one, maybe two, eggs in retrieval. I go back on Monday morning to see how things are going - my guess is I trigger Monday night for a Wednesday retrieval.

It'd disappointing. My last two cycles with my original IVF doc got me 6-7 follicles and 2-3 embryos each. Dr Sh.er talks about quality over quantity, but of course he'd say that.

I will say, while I do respect his expertise, I don't particularly enjoy our interactions - he's definitely less warm than my previous IVF RE (who in turn was less warm than my pre-IVF doc).

I have to decide before retrieval if I'm going to add a third retrieval cycle to our plan. Even though here I've been talking about three retrievals, then testing, then transfer, we only paid for two initially. We can upgrade to the 3-cycle plan anytime before the first retrieval.

I'm having a tough time with it. On one hand this cycle is so depressing I wonder if a third one is worth it. It would cost another $5k with the clinic, plus about $6-7k in meds. But the genetic testing cost won't change.

This is our last effort with my eggs. And if we can increase production by 50% by doing a third cycle, that seems worth it (2 eggs -> 3 eggs). Of course 2-3 eggs doesn't equal 2-3 embryos as we all know. Statistically, about 30% of our embryos should be sound. So really we're talking about trying to up our chances of having a single normal embryo. Ugh.

My husband and I have been talking about starting a donor egg cycle in parallel - we'd want to do the genetic testing with that as well, so that way we'd end the year with more options. And we do want more than one child (one of the reasons we went to this staggered plan was the possibility of collecting enough embryos that we could possibly end up with more than one normal one. Seems pretty unlikely now.

And if we do have a normal embryo, I lean more and more to getting a surrogate, given my 50% chance of a match that would lead to failure. But we could try donor eggs in me - one at a time, since the match issue is still there.

Blarg. All we want is to have a family. It sucks that it's this hard.