We Are Doing Fine

Yes, our first cycle of IVF did fail. After getting a second negative home pregnancy test on Tuesday morning, I kind of already knew what the news was going to be on Thursday, but of course we had to wait until yesterday afternoon to get the final say. Tuesday was definitely a much harder day for me than yesterday, but poor Roger, who is my eternal optimist, held out hope until we had the blood test results, so he was more than disappointed last night. It is of course devastating news, but both Roger and I concurred that we feel like a huge burden has been lifted off our shoulders. We didn't realize how all-consuming this process had become the last couple of months, and for now at least we feel free from it all. We haven't made up our mind completely about what we'll do next, but more than likely we'll try IVF at least one more time, maybe in October or November, and see if we can get a better result. We qualified for what is called the Outcome Based Plan which means this: You get three tries (cycles). If the first cycle fails, which it did, we can opt to not try anymore and get 100% of our cycle fee that we paid refunded back to us. We can try a second time and if it fails get 75% of our money back and then if we try a third time and it fails we get 50% of our money back. It's tempting at this point to take the money and run! But I'm sure we'll give it one more try before we throw in the towel. Right now I'm looking forward to a break from all the injections and doctor appointments.

I haven't talked to Dr. A yet, but I did talk to the embryologist yesterday, and I learned quite a bit of what might have contributed to our failed cycle. Apparently our embryos were not as good of quality as Dr. A led us to believe on the day of transfer. Embryos are graded on a 1 to 3 scale with 1 being the best and 3 being the worst. Even though we did a 5-day transfer, which is the most conducive for the embryos, the quality of both of the embryos used was actually a Grade 2 and not a Grade 1 like we thought. I guess I didn't ask specific enough questions, but Dr. A led us to believe that the embryos looked "perfect" and therefore we only needed to transfer two, not three. I also learned yesterday that we have no frozen embryos. We were told we would have at least one. We have none. The fact that we have no frozen embryos doesn't really bother me; the fact that there seems to be a communication problem between me and Roger and our doctor does. I understand the value in being optimistic, but I would like to know the whole story too. So, anyway, that may be the reason we are not pregnant. We'll hope for better embryos the next time around if we decide to try again.

Thank you , thank you, thank you so much for all the emails, phone calls, text messages, and blog comments from everyone. Your support has meant so very much to me and Roger. We have some amazing friends and family, that's for sure. I'm planning on leaving the blog open for now, although there will probably not be a whole lot of posts until we decide what we're going to do. Adoption is still very much in our mind and heart right now, and all of this could be leading us to that very place. You just never know.