Happy Easter everyone!
So I suck at blogging.
A little recap of the last few weeks. We had our psych eval and it went well and we got our forms notarized and mailed back in. My period showed up yesterday and I started estrace (estrogen) for our donor embryo FET. My lining check should be in 11 days and my transfer will hopefully be in 16 days.
I've also been working on a blog for NIAW and made my first post today. I wanted somewhere to share information about IF, but I am not ready to share everything about our IF journey with my friends and family. So I decided to create a new blog. Here it is for anyone who is interested:
http://infertilityknowledge.blogspot.com
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Donor Embryo FET Progress and NIAW
So we made more progress in our donor embryo FET cycle, our Psych Evaluation is scheduled! I finally heard back from the psychologist this afternoon. This was our last big step to complete before we could cycle. My last steps are getting our forms notarized and sent back and filling my prescriptions (I guess we still have to pay for the cycle too). I am planning on marking getting my prescription filled off the list tomorrow. I have to mail out some jamberry nail wraps to some of my IF online friends and there is a post office across from the specialty pharmacy. Two birds one stone!
I also decided to start a new project for NIAW. I am creating a blog just to post info about infertility. Right now I am working on posts around Resolves theme for NIAW, "Resolve to Know More..." I'll post a link when I get some more finished. I am hoping to share this new blog on facebook for NIAW. More to come later.
I also decided to start a new project for NIAW. I am creating a blog just to post info about infertility. Right now I am working on posts around Resolves theme for NIAW, "Resolve to Know More..." I'll post a link when I get some more finished. I am hoping to share this new blog on facebook for NIAW. More to come later.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Random thoughts on Donor Embryos and Infertility
I mentioned in previous posts that I've been seeing a therapist that specializes in infertility, which has been super helpful. It's forced me to talk about my feelings about infertility, most of which I have been burying for the last 6 months or so.
One of the things I mentioned in my last appointment was that I realized the other day that I won't have those moments where I blame my child's bad behavior on my husband's DNA. I always imagined our children taking after me or my husband, but genetically our children won't. My therapist asked me if it made me sad, which is hard to answer. I think any person would be lying if they said it doesn't make them a little sad to give up the genetic ties to their children. Mostly though, it's just a weird thought, not sad, just strange.
The other thing that I realized the other day is that our donors are around the same age as my mother. The embryos have been frozen for 12 years. If we do get pregnant, our child/ren will have genetic siblings that are 13 and 18 years older.
I have found some silver linings to infertility. My favorite occurred to me when I was listening to a coworker talk about trying to explain to her young child where babies came from. I've got it easy. I'll just tell my child that I went to the doctor and he put a baby in my belly. Honesty is the best policy, right?
One of the things I mentioned in my last appointment was that I realized the other day that I won't have those moments where I blame my child's bad behavior on my husband's DNA. I always imagined our children taking after me or my husband, but genetically our children won't. My therapist asked me if it made me sad, which is hard to answer. I think any person would be lying if they said it doesn't make them a little sad to give up the genetic ties to their children. Mostly though, it's just a weird thought, not sad, just strange.
The other thing that I realized the other day is that our donors are around the same age as my mother. The embryos have been frozen for 12 years. If we do get pregnant, our child/ren will have genetic siblings that are 13 and 18 years older.
I have found some silver linings to infertility. My favorite occurred to me when I was listening to a coworker talk about trying to explain to her young child where babies came from. I've got it easy. I'll just tell my child that I went to the doctor and he put a baby in my belly. Honesty is the best policy, right?
Thursday, March 27, 2014
It's been awhile...
Ok, I suck at blogging. So here is a quick recap of the last 4 weeks:
After our 2nd opinion consult, I had my first appointment with my counselor that specializes in infertility. She's great. She really understands the emotions tied to infertility and pregnancy loss because she's been through it. She went through fertility treatments to conceive her son and conceived her daughter after her first IVF cycle. She was pregnant with twins from IVF, but her son was stillborn. It's been great for me to explore my feelings about infertility, especially now that we are taking a new path to parenthood. I've also realized how bad my anxiety has been the last few months and we have been working on ways to deal with it.
On the treatment front, we have moved ahead with the donor embryo program through FI.RM. The program is a closed donation program and does not require a home study. Because of this we have been able to move forward quickly. My consult went well and I already had all of the prerequisite medical tests completed. We were able to go through their profiles and got our first choice in donors. We are now the proud parents of 9 snowflakes!
In some ways picking a donor was difficult, but in other ways it was easy. Emotionally we were both drawn to the same couple, they had the physical characteristics we were looking for and their personalities/interests seemed similar to ours. The bonus was that they had 3 blasts and 6 day 2 embryos to donate. The reservations we had were that the genetic mother (GM) was 38 when the embryos were created and she was adopted so we don't have a family history for her. She also had a few health problems, but it's hard to tell if they are genetic with no family history. We went with our gut and chose them as our donors. The nurse coordinator thought that they were still a good choice despite the mother's age since their IF issues were MFI and they were successful with their first transfer.
Our last step before we can cycle is to do our psych evaluation. I received our forms yesterday, filled them our, and I am sending them back to the psychologist today. Once she gets them back we can schedule our evaluation. Once this is done, we should be ready to cycle. I should be starting meds in about 3 weeks and our transfer should be in about 5 weeks.
Throw in a business trip to the UK and it's been a busy 4 weeks.
After our 2nd opinion consult, I had my first appointment with my counselor that specializes in infertility. She's great. She really understands the emotions tied to infertility and pregnancy loss because she's been through it. She went through fertility treatments to conceive her son and conceived her daughter after her first IVF cycle. She was pregnant with twins from IVF, but her son was stillborn. It's been great for me to explore my feelings about infertility, especially now that we are taking a new path to parenthood. I've also realized how bad my anxiety has been the last few months and we have been working on ways to deal with it.
On the treatment front, we have moved ahead with the donor embryo program through FI.RM. The program is a closed donation program and does not require a home study. Because of this we have been able to move forward quickly. My consult went well and I already had all of the prerequisite medical tests completed. We were able to go through their profiles and got our first choice in donors. We are now the proud parents of 9 snowflakes!
In some ways picking a donor was difficult, but in other ways it was easy. Emotionally we were both drawn to the same couple, they had the physical characteristics we were looking for and their personalities/interests seemed similar to ours. The bonus was that they had 3 blasts and 6 day 2 embryos to donate. The reservations we had were that the genetic mother (GM) was 38 when the embryos were created and she was adopted so we don't have a family history for her. She also had a few health problems, but it's hard to tell if they are genetic with no family history. We went with our gut and chose them as our donors. The nurse coordinator thought that they were still a good choice despite the mother's age since their IF issues were MFI and they were successful with their first transfer.
Our last step before we can cycle is to do our psych evaluation. I received our forms yesterday, filled them our, and I am sending them back to the psychologist today. Once she gets them back we can schedule our evaluation. Once this is done, we should be ready to cycle. I should be starting meds in about 3 weeks and our transfer should be in about 5 weeks.
Throw in a business trip to the UK and it's been a busy 4 weeks.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Second Opinion Consult
So I had my second opinion consult with RMA yesterday. I really liked Dr. M he knew how to balance being nice and being straight forward, not everyone can do this.
So he had me go through all of of treatment so far and he asked questions about each of my IVF cycles and here is his opinion:
First he thinks we have an egg quality issue (duh) and maybe a slight sperm issue as well (my husband's last SA showed 3% morph). His big concern is the egg issue since a good egg can fix bad sperm, but if you have a bad egg it doesn't matter how much good sperm you have you'll end up with poor quality embryos. He also disagreed with all of my protocols. He thinks Lupron and BCP suppressed me too much, he thinks the increase in stims for IVF #3 was a waste (he said studies show that anything over 450 IU of FSH can't be absorbed, so you just make expensive urine), he thinks that the ratio of FSH:LH was wrong (he say you need 3:1, mine was more like 10:1), he also thinks that I may have been triggered a day too late and that I may have had post mature eggs and that caused some embryo quality issues, and he thinks Intralipids were a waste and there was no point to testing for worrying about autoimmune when we don't even know if we were transferring normal embryos.
His recommendation for treatment is antagonist protocol with estrogen priming with no BCP. He also recommended a freeze all cycle since we often have slow growing embryos. He feels that the uterus and embryo get out of sync, especially with slow growing embryos and that it is better to wait and do a frozen transfer than to transfer fresh with suboptimal conditions. He also recommended genetic testing for our embryos. He also sent a list of tests that he recommended we have done, including karyotyping, which my RE shot down the idea every time I brought it up.
It is amazing to me that two different clinics can both have great success rates and radically different approaches to IVF. Unfortunately we won't be able to afford IVF with RMA, if money was no object I would definitely consider cycling there. The program seems top notch and I think if anything was going to work after our failed cycles, it would be their approach
We did decide to move forward with donor embryos and I am really excited. My consult with FI.RM is on Monday and I should be able to get the ball rolling after that.
So he had me go through all of of treatment so far and he asked questions about each of my IVF cycles and here is his opinion:
First he thinks we have an egg quality issue (duh) and maybe a slight sperm issue as well (my husband's last SA showed 3% morph). His big concern is the egg issue since a good egg can fix bad sperm, but if you have a bad egg it doesn't matter how much good sperm you have you'll end up with poor quality embryos. He also disagreed with all of my protocols. He thinks Lupron and BCP suppressed me too much, he thinks the increase in stims for IVF #3 was a waste (he said studies show that anything over 450 IU of FSH can't be absorbed, so you just make expensive urine), he thinks that the ratio of FSH:LH was wrong (he say you need 3:1, mine was more like 10:1), he also thinks that I may have been triggered a day too late and that I may have had post mature eggs and that caused some embryo quality issues, and he thinks Intralipids were a waste and there was no point to testing for worrying about autoimmune when we don't even know if we were transferring normal embryos.
His recommendation for treatment is antagonist protocol with estrogen priming with no BCP. He also recommended a freeze all cycle since we often have slow growing embryos. He feels that the uterus and embryo get out of sync, especially with slow growing embryos and that it is better to wait and do a frozen transfer than to transfer fresh with suboptimal conditions. He also recommended genetic testing for our embryos. He also sent a list of tests that he recommended we have done, including karyotyping, which my RE shot down the idea every time I brought it up.
It is amazing to me that two different clinics can both have great success rates and radically different approaches to IVF. Unfortunately we won't be able to afford IVF with RMA, if money was no object I would definitely consider cycling there. The program seems top notch and I think if anything was going to work after our failed cycles, it would be their approach
We did decide to move forward with donor embryos and I am really excited. My consult with FI.RM is on Monday and I should be able to get the ball rolling after that.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
It feel like it's been forever...
So it feels like it's been a long time since I posted, but it's only been 5 days. Maybe it's because I feel like we've taken giant steps forward in the last few days. I have all of my consults scheduled and they start this week. Here's my infertility appointments schedule for the next few weeks, I swear I don't have this many appointments when I am in cycle.
Sunday February 23rd: IVF Seminar at my clinic (they raffle off a free cycle)
Wednesday February 26th: Consult with RMA NJ
Thursday February 27th: First therapy appointment with a counselor who specializes in infertility
Monday March 3rd: Consult with FIRM about their donor embryo program
Tuesday March 18th: Consult with CCRM (thinking about canceling this appointment)
We've pretty much decided that we will cycle with RMA if we can afford it (pretty much might come down to us getting in to a clinical trial), otherwise we will move on to donor embryos with FIRM. DH is excited about moving on to donor embryos, he's been hooked on the idea since we began talking about third party reproduction alternatives back in November.
Honestly I am excited about the option too, but it took me a little longer to get there. When we first learned that IVF #3 was a BFN, my initial reaction was "I want to cycle again." I think it came from a mixture of fear and disappointment. Moving on to other options means trying something new which brings on fear of the unknown. I know how to do IVF, in fact I am good at it (just not the getting pregnant part). Donor Embryos involves a FET and travel to a new clinic, both of which I've never done. My initial reaction was about me wanting to stay in my comfort zone. I think the other part of my reaction came from the disappointment of our failed cycle. I was really hopeful this last cycle, much more than the previous cycle. I really thought it was going to work for us and finding out it didn't was a hard blow. All I could think about was how close I felt we got and that with one more cycle we might be able to find success. Once I took some time to calm down and look into all our options and take a hard look at our finances, I knew that we needed to make some hard decisions. We have the money for one last cycle, but if it failed we will be forced into a financial break. Or we could look into other more affordable options, like embryo adoption or embryo donation. I think once I realized this our answer was clear. I want to be a mom and I want to experience pregnancy and I was willing to go with the option that has the greatest chance of making that happen. With embryo donation we could afford multiple attempts even with the cost of travel. Honestly now that I have had time to get used to the idea, I am excited. I feel like we are on the right path now.
We are also very lucky to have supportive families. Both of our parents support our decision to pursue donor embryos. My parents have even offered to give us money to help pay for our airfare. DH's mom just told him that you have to do what you have to do. She reminded him that she adopted his brother and she loves him just as much as she loves DH. They have always offered to help us no matter what path we chose (IVF, egg or sperm donors, embryo adoption or donor embryos, or even traditional adoption).
Sunday February 23rd: IVF Seminar at my clinic (they raffle off a free cycle)
Wednesday February 26th: Consult with RMA NJ
Thursday February 27th: First therapy appointment with a counselor who specializes in infertility
Monday March 3rd: Consult with FIRM about their donor embryo program
Tuesday March 18th: Consult with CCRM (thinking about canceling this appointment)
We've pretty much decided that we will cycle with RMA if we can afford it (pretty much might come down to us getting in to a clinical trial), otherwise we will move on to donor embryos with FIRM. DH is excited about moving on to donor embryos, he's been hooked on the idea since we began talking about third party reproduction alternatives back in November.
Honestly I am excited about the option too, but it took me a little longer to get there. When we first learned that IVF #3 was a BFN, my initial reaction was "I want to cycle again." I think it came from a mixture of fear and disappointment. Moving on to other options means trying something new which brings on fear of the unknown. I know how to do IVF, in fact I am good at it (just not the getting pregnant part). Donor Embryos involves a FET and travel to a new clinic, both of which I've never done. My initial reaction was about me wanting to stay in my comfort zone. I think the other part of my reaction came from the disappointment of our failed cycle. I was really hopeful this last cycle, much more than the previous cycle. I really thought it was going to work for us and finding out it didn't was a hard blow. All I could think about was how close I felt we got and that with one more cycle we might be able to find success. Once I took some time to calm down and look into all our options and take a hard look at our finances, I knew that we needed to make some hard decisions. We have the money for one last cycle, but if it failed we will be forced into a financial break. Or we could look into other more affordable options, like embryo adoption or embryo donation. I think once I realized this our answer was clear. I want to be a mom and I want to experience pregnancy and I was willing to go with the option that has the greatest chance of making that happen. With embryo donation we could afford multiple attempts even with the cost of travel. Honestly now that I have had time to get used to the idea, I am excited. I feel like we are on the right path now.
We are also very lucky to have supportive families. Both of our parents support our decision to pursue donor embryos. My parents have even offered to give us money to help pay for our airfare. DH's mom just told him that you have to do what you have to do. She reminded him that she adopted his brother and she loves him just as much as she loves DH. They have always offered to help us no matter what path we chose (IVF, egg or sperm donors, embryo adoption or donor embryos, or even traditional adoption).
Sunday, February 16, 2014
The hard part of infertility
So everyone thinks the hard part of infertility is giving yourself shots, or dealing with the side effects of hormones, or having to go through invasive/embarrassing procedures. To me all of that is the easy part. Stabbing myself in the stomach with a needle multiple times a day (or letting DH stab me in he ass with a needle), easy peasy. Hot flashes, headaches, mood swings, heart burn, all a piece of cake. Dates with the vag cam, letting a doctor stick a giant needle up my vagina to suck eggs out of my follicles, letting the doct stick a catheter up my cervix while I try not to piss myself because of my full bladder, and generally spending most of my appointments with my feet in stirrups and lady bits exposed, no big deal.
Right now is the hard part. Waiting for appointments, not knowing exactly what the future holds. Not knowing exactly what the next step is. This is hard for me. The worst part is knowing that it will possibly be the end of March before we finish our consults and make a finalized plan for our next steps. I am a planner. I need a plan or I just feel lost, like we are just stuck not moving forward.
I am trying to relax and just focus on the next appointment. Right now I need to finish up my RMA paperwork and get it all emailed in. Then next Sunday is my clinic's IVF seminar and I hope to get to ask the head RE her thoughts on our situation and maybe schedule a consultation with her. Then the 26th is my phone consult with RMA. That along with work ought to keep me occupied until the end of the month. You would think 2.5 years of TTC would have taught me some patience. Yeah, not so much.
Right now is the hard part. Waiting for appointments, not knowing exactly what the future holds. Not knowing exactly what the next step is. This is hard for me. The worst part is knowing that it will possibly be the end of March before we finish our consults and make a finalized plan for our next steps. I am a planner. I need a plan or I just feel lost, like we are just stuck not moving forward.
I am trying to relax and just focus on the next appointment. Right now I need to finish up my RMA paperwork and get it all emailed in. Then next Sunday is my clinic's IVF seminar and I hope to get to ask the head RE her thoughts on our situation and maybe schedule a consultation with her. Then the 26th is my phone consult with RMA. That along with work ought to keep me occupied until the end of the month. You would think 2.5 years of TTC would have taught me some patience. Yeah, not so much.
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