#embryo transfer

Insert IVF Process:

SHOTS ✅

Endless Blood Draws ✅

Uncomfortable # of Transvaginal Ultrasounds ✅

Egg Retrieval ✅

We started with 14 eggs. 13 were mature. 8 fertilized.

We officially have 3 beautiful little frozen embryos 💕

I’m anxious about my insurance not kicking in properly because I still haven’t been able to sign up for COBRA yet. I’m anxious about the fact that one of my impacted wisdom teeth (that stayed under the gum for almost 24 years) is now suddenly starting to push out and I may need to get it pulled next week before the transfer (or else risk it causing a ton of pain and potential infection during pregnancy). I’m frustrated that my father in law took it upon himself to tell my husband’s other relatives that we’re going through infertility treatment when we specifically asked him not to do so. But of course mostly I’m just terrified of the transfer not working and I know that the more anxious I am, the worse that is for the future baby. I am trying so hard to teach my brain to not react to every source of stress by feeling anxiety. It’s possible to deal with stressful situations without getting anxious about them. I’ve never been able to do it, but I know it’s possible. I’ve never had a better motivation to try to accomplish that, but it’s just so hard.

And the most confusing part about all of this is that I don’t even know if any of this is rational or if it’s just part of the weird mood swings I’m getting from my estrogen pills? And am I going to feel this confusingly hormonal throughout my whole pregnancy? It’s super weird being on such a high dose of hormones and not being able to trust your own feelings because you don’t know if they’re “real” and rational, or if they’re a hormonal overreaction.

I need to chill and stop overthinking so much.

Oh, and we bought a car

One embryo transferred yesterday!

Four embryos in the freezer!

The transfer went smoothly, I drank maybe too little this time because I wasn’t uncomfortable at all and they had to press the transducer on my belly quite hard to have any visibility. But they didn’t say anything other than that it went smoothly.

I did get a chance to talk with the doctor after the transfer. He said the ERA lab is insists that when the two previous tests were done, they were correct, although the results were different from the latest. It only means my body is unpredictable in its response to natural progesterone.

In other words, there is simply no telling what the correct time would have been on the earlier transfers because my body can have or cannot have reacted to the trigger shot in the right time. Although it does seem unlikely that it would have reacted normally.

Be that as it may, this cycle’s course of treatment was the course of treatment followed in the cycle that led to the last ERA result and now that my natural progesterone production is zero, there can be no variation in the levels. Or at least no significant variation. So timing-wise, it should work. The biggest question of course is the quality of the embryo.

What I didn’t realise first is that now that I have no progesterone production, I’ll have to continue wearing estrogen pads and taking progesterone pills even if I get pregnant in order to stay pregnant. Also, I won’t get my period as long as I’m on the estrogen pads so the only way to tell if I’m pregnant is the test. And even that can give a false negative first because of the meds. If the test is positive, it’s reliable, but a negative test can’t be trusted on the first few testing days, so they want a blood test. He made me practically swear not to stop any meds even if the test is negative because even if it turned positive later, the pregnancy would fail if there was any break in progesterone supply. That sounded a bit scary. Once the placenta is fully functional around week 9, I’ll stop the meds. IF I get pregnant that is.

So we had an anxious wait until today, when we were back in the clinic to see if they had continued to develop, and they had!

Two of the embryos scored the best quality they could on the 3 categories they assess them on. And the other one wasn’t quite as good, but was still good enough that they were happy to use it in future. That means we had one to transfer, and two to freeze, which is so amazing given PCOS eggs are often worse quality!

We went ahead with embryo transfer this afternoon as planned, so now we just have to wait 9 days until we can test! Trying to not get our hopes up, and to remain as stress free as possible for the next week or so.

Here’s our little blastocyst before transfer. We’re calling it our ‘maybe baby’ :)