IVF on the Down Low

Ugh.  My weight has just not been very stable over the past almost 2 years.  In the beginning it was easy to rationalize not keeping things in check.  I figured I would be pregnant soon anyways and the couple extra pounds wouldn’t make any difference.  Then time wore on and I just got grumpy that not only I wasn’t pregnant, but I was also carrying an extra 5 lbs.  Realizing that this wasn’t happening as quickly as I thought it would, I hired a personal trainer, and got serious about exercise and diet.  Those extra pounds were gone quickly enough.  But then as even more time passed and I still wasn’t pregnant, the cookies, cakes and other comfort foods seemed to call my name with the end of each cycle.   To add another complication, with the IVF cycle came exercise restrictions.  So, here I am today carrying an extra 10 lbs.  I’ve decided to take control.  I might not have control over a lot of things, but I do have control over what I eat.  I know that I will look and feel better without the extra pounds.

For some reason every quest that we make in search of the elusive BFP involves needles.  Like most people, I am certainly not a fan of needles and now I was doing something really crazy – paying somebody to place needles in my body and expecting it to be not only beneficial but relaxing.  I was a little nervous going in to the appointment.  The acupuncturist spent about an hour with me and my husband, discussing our IF journey, the answers to various questions, etc.  He determined that I am “hot” based on some answers to questions like that the primary emotion that I feel is frustration, my eyes have been dry and I’ve been having night sweats.  He also determined that I have some sort of blockage by looking at my tongue.  He thought it might be PCOS related which made sense to me considering this cycle looks like it may be anovulatory (really too early to tell, but I have a feeling).

He took me to the treatment room and DH watched him put in all the needles.  Unlike the many other needles that have pierced my skin in the past these did not cause me any pain, they did not cause me to bleed or bruise.  In fact, they were so thin that I could barely feel them.  When all the needles were in I was left alone to nap.  I could not fall asleep.  I was too tense.  But I left feeling more calm and relaxed than when I arrived.

I have another appointment for next week.  What will acupuncture do for me?  It’s too early to tell but at the very least it helped me to relax.  That’s good enough for me especially if as an added bonus it helps get me pregnant.

Larissa

Since we aren’t currently doing anything on the TTC front, I figured it’s a good time to incorporate some eastern medicine with the western.  A lot of people swear by it, saying that at the very least it helps them to relax and maybe even sleep better.  Sounds good to me!  And you never know.  Maybe it will help our chances the next time we do an IVF cycle.  Here’s hoping I enjoy it!

Now, if I could just convince DH to do this too…

I read all the posts from all the girls starting new IVF cycles.  They are so excited.  They are starting BCP, they are starting stims, they are so optomistic.  Will I be able to face my next cycle with that same optomism?  I just don’t know.

We will be seeing Dr. Swanson at Conceptions on October 8th.  We leave for Vegas on October 9th, so we’ll have a nice relaxing weekend.  Sounds sort of perfect.  For those of you that know that we’re in CO, you might be wondering why we’re not headed to CCRM.  Well, we have our reasons and for now, this just makes more sense for us.

I’m pretty excited about meeting with a new doctor.  Our current one isn’t making me feel very hopeful but just the prospect of seeing someone new brings back some of that hope!

Larissa

That’s how I tend to feel leaving the RE’s office.  We talked a lot but at the same time I don’t feel like we got any answers.  We started by going over all parts of our cycle and how he felt about how everything went.  He said that how my E2 was right on track in the beginning and then shot up suddenly at the end was fairly typical of a high responder.  He was pleased with the number of eggs we got.  He was pleased with how many fertilized.  He was pleased with how they were dividing in the beginning.  Then he got to the not so good part.  We had quite a bit of fragmentation in our embryos which he attributes to not so great egg quality.  He wasn’t quite so gung ho about doing a FET when we talked to him today which actually made me feel a little bit better about him as a doctor.  He gives us about a 30% chance of success with a FET with the one embryo.  Not great.  He gives us about a 50% chance of success with a new fresh cycle.

This is when I started asking questions about what a new fresh cycle would look like.  I asked what he would do to help improve egg quality.  He said that there wasn’t much he could do to improve egg quality.  I don’t buy that.  I asked what he would do to prevent OHSS.  He didn’t seem sure.  He said we could drop med dosages.  He said that we could switch from follistim/menopur to lo-dose HCG slightly earlier.  He said that the risk we run with either of those scenarios would be that we get a disappointingly low number of eggs at retrieval.  I wasn’t very satisfied with that answer.

He also thought that we should take a couple months off before we do anything at all.  If we choose, we could start a FET with my next period, but he didn’t seem very in favor of us doing anything so quickly.  In the end, he said that considering our wonderful insurance coverage, if it were him he would do a fresh cycle.

Considering all that and considering my unease and generaly discontent, we will be scheduling a consultation elsewhere during the couple of months that our RE wants us to take off anyways.  I will be calling tomorrow to schedule an appointment and just having that plan in place makes me feel a little bit better.  Maybe I’ll get some sleep tonight.

Larissa

Insomnia.

I am so scared we are going to fuck this up.  What if we stay with this doctor and we have another completely disastrous cycle?  What if we leave this doctor and it turns out we should have stayed?  What if we use up the rest of our insurance money on the wrong doctor?  I have no way of knowing whether anything would have been different elsewhere.  If we move and fail again I will always wonder if things would have been better if we stayed and let this doctor apply whatever he learned from our first cycle to the next.  But if we stay and have another failure I’ll feel like an idiot for not trying someone new.

Hopefully Shawn will be our voice of reason. I just can’t turn off the debates that keep running through my head.  I just hope the picture is clearer and I can finally get some sleep after tonight’s appointment.

Well, our first IVF did not go so well.  My transfer was canceled due to severe OHSS and only 1 embryo made it to freeze which makes the chances of a FET (frozen embryo transfer) working pretty low.  So what’s the next step?  Currently, we have no idea.  We have an appointment on Wednesday to talk things over with our doctor.  He’s really in favor of doing the FET, but I don’t really see the point.  Really, I think it’s time to see a new doctor.  But then what about our 1 little embryo?  Personally, I am leaning towards doing the FET and then moving on to another doctor if it doesn’t work.  Who knows.  That one embie could be “the one”.

So why switch doctors?  This will be a really hard decision for us.  We both like our doctor.  He’s a really nice guy and he genuinely seems to care about us.  But at this point, that’s not good enough.  I suspect we’d get better results elsewhere, so it’s probably time to move elsewhere.  There are a few things that just don’t seem right to me about our cycle. Maybe the doctor has reasonable explanations for those things. One is that he let my E2 level get REALLY high. It was 6796 on the day I triggered. Based on what I’ve read since, most doctors start getting nervous when it’s more like 3500. The other thing is that only 1 embryo made it to blast and I was expecting more. This could be due to compromised egg quality due to the high E2 or due to something with the protocol or due to lab conditions or I could just have low quality eggs. Who knows.

Well, if you have found this blog you are probably aware that this is not our first blog.  We are moving from our old blogging home (http://sometimesittakesthree.wordpress.com) although it has served us well.  We were very open with our friends and family about our first IVF, but know it’s time to back away from that as we approach our next steps.  It was great having everyone’s support, but it was also stressful having to constantly reassure the people around me that I was going to be ok.  Even though we’re going into hiding a bit, I still need this outlet.  I need a place to vent and so does my husband.

So here we are.  We’ve arrrived at our new blogging home.