Saturday, June 25, 2011

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.

11 comments:

  1. Wishing you the best!

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  2. It seems the like the more options we have the harder the decisions become. I would say if you are trying to use your embryos. going for the third makes sense. Follow your gut...I think it tells us more than we let it sometimes :)

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  3. I'm so sorry for the disappointing news. I really wish this was easier for you. I would probably go for the 3rd round, just so there would be no regrets. But I know these kind of decisions are very hard. Hang in there! I hope you get good news at your next appointment!

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  4. This process is so frustrating. We only got two embryos on our last cycle and neither of them were very good. It was so heartbreaking. Now I am scared that this cycle will turn out the same way. It is so rough going through this over and over. I don't know how we do it. Good luck and I am wishing you the best!

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  5. Sounds like a long journey. As for upgrading to 3 cycles, if this is your last shot and you can afford it (i.e., doing the 3rd cycle will not prevent you from doing donor eggs), I would definitely do it. Out of the 10 embryos we transfered only ONE was good quality (er, at least I only got pregnant from one of them). (I have DOR, too). Thus, more embryos is better...plus you never know which embryo will work. Also, about donor eggs, I am not sure that you can start a donor cycle unless you are completely done doing other cycles (at least that was how our donor egg clinic worked). I.e., they wouldn't assign you a donor unless you were 100% ready to cycle (not taking drugs, not cycling, etc.). My clinic also wouldn't let you freeze embryos in anticipation of a future cycle. Good luck! (Runningmama from More Room in my Heart)

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  6. Tough tough questions. I guess it all comes down to two things...money and emotional stamina. Do you have enough funds in both money and emotional stamina? I don't think I would pursue DE until you have amptly grieved enough the loss of the genetic connection to your baby. Its something you can easily pursue after and very quickly...like maybe a couple of months? So you wouldn't be saving that much time. Just my opinion.

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  7. I'm so sorry that things didn't go as planned. I wish I knew what to say or had earth-shattering advice. All I can do is let you know I'm here. I'm pulling for you. And I wish you didn't have to make any of these next step decisions.

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  8. Yes, flying to Vegas on a Friday is interesting. So sorry you are not getting better news with this cycle. I think it's great you are thinking of doing donor eggs in parallel...it's good to have more options I think.
    Good luck this week!
    xo

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  10. It's hard to make the decisions you want to when it costs lots of money. It shouldn't be so hard -- it's just not fair. Good luck. And, three egg retrievals in a row sounds like torture to me, but I'm the OHSS queen.

    Loved your airplane story. hahahaha!!!

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  11. At least the Friday night flight to Vegas helps with funny distractions! I wish I had advice to give you about 2 or 3 cycles. All I can say is that my approach to all of this is to ask myself what would be the path of least regret, even when considering the worst-case scenario. My goal was to have no regrets no matter what happened, knowing I gave it my best. That's all we can do. Thinking of you. xox

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