March 2015.
I got an email from my embryologist:
Treatment: IVF – Blastocyst culture with PGS for embryo banking.
Number of eggs collected: 3
Number of eggs inseminated: 3
Number of eggs fertilised: 3
Embryos cryopreserved: 2 X Day 5 (3BB & 3BB)Awaiting PGS result.
Thanks! Have a great day.
Uhm. Okay. So that was a fun way to discover one our blastocysts arrested. We are left with two. Two little blastocysts of okay quality (not great quality, just okay) who have both been sampled and frozen. It feels like a very abrupt way to end what has so far been an insane round of IVF.
I knew this already though – intellectually. I’m heartbroken that we only got two (though my IVF positivity kicks in with ‘we only need one!’ It’s a bit chirpy and is living on hope). We’ll do another round, once my body has had time to recover. I’ll start taking DHEA to improve the number of eggs we get next time and hopefully, hopefully we’ll only need to do this once more. We’ll have many more eggs, and hopefully better quality eggs. And hopefully, hopefully some of them will be chromosonally normal.
And then, I can stop. I can stop the drugs, and the diets and all of the crazy in the details. I will have done as much as I can, I would have done the best I can. No compromise. And that’s as best as I can hope for Plan B, right?
I read that it’s easier to focus on the difficult things, the things that worry you. It’s much more difficult to focus on the positive, but if you practice, you’ll get better at it. So, here’s my small list, focusing on the positive:
Grace in small things:
- We’re done with all the invasive horrible things. No almost daily scans up my vajayjay. No more bloods, or injections. No more teams of people looking at all my intimate details. My body has become my own again.
- I feel a bit more like me. I have more energy, the bruises are fading and the bloating and tenderness is going. I didn’t realise I’d lost me, but I had. I’m glad to be recovering.
- We know now. What it’s like, how a cycle goes and what egg collection is like. The results speak pretty clearly, my diagnosis of low ovarian reserve was not wrong. Power in knowledge, and we have had a good round to learn from.
- I can do more. We’re not finished yet, this isn’t the end of the story. I’m grateful that I’m in a position where I still have the funds, and the support and the time to figure out what else I can do. I still have options. I still have hope, and it isn’t bound up in just the two little frozen blastocysts we have.
- I have Zee. I worried for a long time that because I wasn’t fun… I couldn’t drink, or eat normal foods, and didn’t have the energy to go out that perhaps Zee and I would go downhill. We didn’t, I’d say it pulled us together more than it pulled us apart. I love him.