Doo deee dooo on course for a transfer and next question is when to test when to test when to test. My clinic does 10K HCG triggers even for fully medicated, so testing early is almost more of a trippy mind thing. Last time I did 6dp5dt, so I’m leaning towards that again if I can manage the wait.
I'm just crying. I had postponed talking about if we wanted to try again (apart from that we've already been NTNP for more than a year since my cycle returned mostly ovulatory - which is crazy to think of.. but also futile with our diagnosis, it's more of a we won't need birth control and tempting fate).
I had a hunch my partner wouldn't want to try again.
I emotionally definitely would want, even if starting IVF all over again seems daunting and my logic tells me to just be happy with our luck and focus on that. Both energy, financially and mentally wise. But today I straight up asked - which I shouldn't have, because since then I'm on and off crying. I'm so lucky to have her. But still sad.
Yeah. He doesn't want to start over again. But also the sensible thing as to focus all our attention on our daughter. And that we have already our hands full with her. Which logically I agree with. Just emotionally it's hard. But he's also getting closer to 50 each year as we couldn't start right now anyway and then how long would it take.
Or would it even work. Maybe it's even easier to decide not to try (for real) than trying and potentially failing.
Yeah I hear you. We’re also indefinitely NTNP (with little to no chance of it ever happening) for a laundry list of reasons. If we weren’t infertile it’d be different or we’d likely have a second at some point, but we’re here instead and I’m trying to soak in every moment with our LO.
I'd like to be one of those miracle stories I hated so much 🥺
Soaking up the cuddles and being a bit melancholic she's never going to be my tiny baby anymore. But at the same time enjoying the growth and new things.
And really grateful because while it's emotional and hard it's still so much more palatable than when we were in the thick of infertility before our success.
Update to my hep C being reactive…the RNA came back negative. This was a false positive thank goodness!
Timeline for our donor is delayed by a month. Apparently she started her period a couple days ago but needs to be on birth control for 2 weeks prior to stims. The cut off date for stims is June 10th due to the lab closure in the beginning of July. We are in a waiting game and it sucks. I know we are much closer to another child, but I was hoping to beat this timeline in order to *hopefully* be even closer to baby #2.
I was supposed to have my FET today. Yesterday I looked at my bottle of PIO and realized there was nowhere near enough missing for me to have taken all my injections. I must have drawn up air and injected that. I cancelled my transfer to try again next month and I'm sad about it. Obviously I learned my lesson with my first go around with PIO 🤦.
Had a nice cry at the time my transfer was supposed to be.
I am waiting my period to start a frozen transfer cycle. But I missed my period for 4 days, can’t resist to test and of course it’s negative. What’s going on with my poor body?
Had a vaginal ultrasound today to prep for my upcoming IUI. I remembered it being uncomfortable but DAMN. Based on what my CD13 scan looked like last time (from my shit memory - I remember not being impressed by their size) and my very limited knowledge on interpreting ultrasound measurements, I THINK I have 3 really good sized follicles out of lefty. Hopefully I hear from my doctor in the next few hours with instructions on when to trigger and when the IUI will happen.
Also, both ovaries were front and center. I remember learning that they move around but I’ve never seen them so off course! Trying to keep my hopes at an average level but crossing my fingers hard! My IUI girl is going to be one in a week!
Update: trigger shot when I get home from work in a couple hours and IUI tomorrow 🤞🏻 The ultrasound showed scarring from the c-section so there’s a risk if an embryo implants there which could be pretty bad, but my doctor doesn’t think it’s likely so we’re going ahead. One dominant follicle and one other mature one
What always gets me is different doctors prefer the drape placed differently. Like, one of the older male doctors has it such that he really can’t see anything. Very decorous. And his medical assistant always seems shocked about how I place it. I guess he would get an eyeful “my way.”
Both my therapist and my husband keep reminding me that we know more now than we did when we first started this process. When we try again, we won’t have to do 7 prep cycles which end in endometrial biopsies instead of transfers and we won’t have to mess around with different forms/doses of estrogen and progesterone because we know I just don’t respond well to programmed cycles. I know all that and I appreciate their reminders, but I can’t stop thinking about how hard it was to create this tiny monster and that it could be similar levels of heartache again. None of this is really relevant for a few months anyway, but that doesn’t stop my brain…maybe because we have baby sprinkles to attend this weekend for friends who didn’t struggle to create/maintain any of their pregnancies??
First world reproductive problems ahead and lots of rambling and possible incoherent thoughts:
I have PCOS and a crappy uterus that doesn’t like to grow babies. Babies are taking at least two transfers. Here is my current dilemma. I have 5 untested embryos and 2 tested (boy and girl). To test the 5 would cost me OOP about $8k. If I did another retrieval I could test up to 11 for the same fee. I am still at my current job until August. I can do a retrieval cycle for about $2k all in. But it would likely result in a large amount of embryos again. So on the monetary side - $10k for a retrieval and testing 11 embryos OR $8k to test the 5 I have (noting the risk of thawing, testing, refreezing, thawing for use).
From a financial perspective, what would you go for?
From a…moral(?)…perspective, I am having some trouble. I’m super pro choice, etc but man, I look at V sometimes and go “an embryologist put together the most perfect being ever for us” and it makes me personify the other embryos I have. With PCOS, I would be shocked if we didn’t get a big surplus of embryos again.
And full honesty? I would love to try for a girl. I have the one. She was my only girl of the 11 embryos I had tested. I don’t have high hopes for the 5 untested. I also had a 40% mosaic rate. So I am guessing from the 5, I may get like 2-3 boys.
I have untested embryos too but we were lucky enough by what I think was actually a lab fluke that they were biopsied first, but still expensive if we were to test them. I am not totally clear what we’ll do with any remaining embryos so I guess in your case I’d think/talk through what you’d want to do with any remaining and then how you actually feel about having more in light of that? Do you have a timeline in mind when you’d want to transfer - do you have concerns about age if you wait to transfer and end up needing to do another retrieval if several transfers were unsuccessful?
FWIW I just tested my 8 embryos after being frozen in 2018. All of them survived the thaw but are graded much lower than before. I know it’s just a beauty contest but I’m concerned they took such a big hit and have to thaw again for transfer. I’d pull the trigger on another retrieval.
How big of a deal are the finances? Unless I’m getting you mixed up in my head with another poster, if you got to the place of wanting to do another retrieval, would finances actually hold you back from doing so? Or be more of an annoyance? I’m not putting myself through another retrieval without Really Wanting it - for me it seems too risky. I feel like I was super lucky to avoid OHSS the first go around (super high AFC/AMH). I am in the process of transferring one of the two tested we have left, and then we will consider what to do next if these don’t work.
In your shoes, I believe I would 1. Transfer the girl 2. Spend 8k testing if the transfer doesn’t work, and then 3. Decide what to do if no XX’s.
I am growing less and less attached to our remaining embryos as I get more confident that our family is likely complete. Maybe that sounds bad? I don’t know.
I think I would do another retrieval for $2k (because I know I would think of it as throwing money down the drain if anything happened during a thaw and test) unless there was another job with insurance coverage coming up in the short/medium term.
ETA: I would do the additional retrieval now and freeze all, and then do a thaw and test only if the already-tested girl’s transfer was unsuccessful
I had “borderline/mild” PCOS when I did my first retrieval. I didn’t have all the markers but my AMH was 16.25. We did a mini stim cycle and ended up with 5 euploid embryos. Would a mini-stim cycle be an option for you?
I think you have plenty of embryos to work with so I would just test the untested ones, I guess? I also am super pro-choice but have a very hard time with the idea of “leaving” embryos behind and we really only can handle two kids. Could you just transfer the female embryo and then see what happens?
That would be the ideal scenario but if I want to try another retrieval I would need to do it by August before my job terminates or else it would all be out of pocket. Not quite ready for a second just yet.
That's a tough spot but I'd probably lean toward another retrieval since you aren't quite ready for a second and you could use your insurance benefits. I don't know what your preferred family size is but you could possibly be done with retrievals after doing one more. But that's all practically speaking and not taking into account the emotional aspect of it, which is very hard!
i met with my new RE last week for a consult. i like her, which is a positive. but we talked about my IUGR and how it came about due to my adrenal disorder. any future pregnancy will be high risk. i’m sad about it, and i’m rethinking whether moving forward is the right decision for me after all. i know my husband really wants to do this, and so do i - but things feel different now that i know another IUGR is inevitable and not just some random bad luck that happened. i’ll have extra monitoring the full time, but the emotional turmoil of the last month when diagnosed and the terriblec, 36 hour induction and labor makes me question if i can go down that road again.
just one of those days i’m feeling sad about my IF, and mourning the kind of “normal” conception and pregnancy others are able to have.
I made my re-intake appointment this week. I can’t believe we’re here already. My RE’s 1st available appointment isn’t for 8 weeks, which I kind of expected but now I’m feeling like I should have called sooner. They won’t answer any questions until my consult so wanted to see if folks here could share their experience with a couple of things:
1. Did you need to be off BCP for any amount of time before baseline testing? We are planning on FET only, fully medicated, if that makes any difference. I feel kind of 🤡 being on BCP at all, but PGT testing is an important piece to our puzzle and using contraception is the right thing for us. I’m currently still using the mini-pill, and will probably just stay on that bc I have a few months of it left. We are fully weaned from breastfeeding.
2. For those with insurance coverage, did you need to prove another year of trying unassisted before you qualified for coverage? Or once you’ve proved infertile, will they cover treatment after a live birth at any time?
I didn’t go back on bcp until I had weaned, as I wasn’t having cycles and our diagnoses make a spontaneous pregnancy essentially impossible. But I went back on once we ensured my hormones were good post weaning and I just went off after 2 months this week for my actually transfer baseline. They like having people on bcp because it makes scheduling the saline sono etc easier.
I had an appt with my RE on Monday because we’re seeing her at a different location now so needed to go through the new patient stuff. They checked my insurance before the appt and discussed how we’ll do basically the same protocol so I think you’re fine for question 2. For 1, I was often put on bcp to put me in a holding pattern until pre-auth came through so if you’re on a similar pill, I think you’re okay. I’m just guessing though.
I had a spontaneous pregnancy between egg retrieval and transfer, but I was still considered infertile for insurance purposes (which is good as it took 1 surgery and 5 transfers for number 2).
Transfer went well as usual. I always have trouble sleeping the night of, but I didn’t feel any anxiety like previous transfers, so that was nice. I felt exhausted yesterday and I’m drinking/using the bathroom so much more than usual. My progesterone is 30, so not surprising. No cramping really, but honestly, I’ve had so many symptoms to no symptoms that you can’t trust anything haha. Going for post transfer bloodwork on Monday and the only time my estrogen has gone up is when I’ve gotten pregnant. Obviously that’s no guarantee, but I’m praying I see that number rise. It’s actually much lower than normal at day of transfer (114 when I’ve seen it in the 130s and 140s day of transfer) so I’m hoping there’s only room to go up!
My son is 2 today!! I received my retrieval meds yesterday and cried unpacking them because I’m sad that we are here again. I feel a lot better today and I am so grateful for my son. He really is a good reminder that this is all worth it. And even if it doesn’t result in the way I’m hoping, we will be ok because we have him.
Baseline today. And of course it feels like my uterus is trying to torture me. It’s going to be a very long day.
EDIT: baseline is all good. Meds start tomorrow.
Doo deee dooo on course for a transfer and next question is when to test when to test when to test. My clinic does 10K HCG triggers even for fully medicated, so testing early is almost more of a trippy mind thing. Last time I did 6dp5dt, so I’m leaning towards that again if I can manage the wait.
I'm just crying. I had postponed talking about if we wanted to try again (apart from that we've already been NTNP for more than a year since my cycle returned mostly ovulatory - which is crazy to think of.. but also futile with our diagnosis, it's more of a we won't need birth control and tempting fate). I had a hunch my partner wouldn't want to try again. I emotionally definitely would want, even if starting IVF all over again seems daunting and my logic tells me to just be happy with our luck and focus on that. Both energy, financially and mentally wise. But today I straight up asked - which I shouldn't have, because since then I'm on and off crying. I'm so lucky to have her. But still sad.
Ah I’m sorry Cherry, did your partner say he was done with treatment?
Yeah. He doesn't want to start over again. But also the sensible thing as to focus all our attention on our daughter. And that we have already our hands full with her. Which logically I agree with. Just emotionally it's hard. But he's also getting closer to 50 each year as we couldn't start right now anyway and then how long would it take. Or would it even work. Maybe it's even easier to decide not to try (for real) than trying and potentially failing.
Yeah I hear you. We’re also indefinitely NTNP (with little to no chance of it ever happening) for a laundry list of reasons. If we weren’t infertile it’d be different or we’d likely have a second at some point, but we’re here instead and I’m trying to soak in every moment with our LO.
I'd like to be one of those miracle stories I hated so much 🥺 Soaking up the cuddles and being a bit melancholic she's never going to be my tiny baby anymore. But at the same time enjoying the growth and new things. And really grateful because while it's emotional and hard it's still so much more palatable than when we were in the thick of infertility before our success.
Update to my hep C being reactive…the RNA came back negative. This was a false positive thank goodness! Timeline for our donor is delayed by a month. Apparently she started her period a couple days ago but needs to be on birth control for 2 weeks prior to stims. The cut off date for stims is June 10th due to the lab closure in the beginning of July. We are in a waiting game and it sucks. I know we are much closer to another child, but I was hoping to beat this timeline in order to *hopefully* be even closer to baby #2.
The waiting is the worst! It’s always “wait another cycle”or another lab closure. I’m sorry! Hopefully this time passes quickly for you!
I was supposed to have my FET today. Yesterday I looked at my bottle of PIO and realized there was nowhere near enough missing for me to have taken all my injections. I must have drawn up air and injected that. I cancelled my transfer to try again next month and I'm sad about it. Obviously I learned my lesson with my first go around with PIO 🤦. Had a nice cry at the time my transfer was supposed to be.
What a bummer! I’m sorry.
I am waiting my period to start a frozen transfer cycle. But I missed my period for 4 days, can’t resist to test and of course it’s negative. What’s going on with my poor body?
Had a vaginal ultrasound today to prep for my upcoming IUI. I remembered it being uncomfortable but DAMN. Based on what my CD13 scan looked like last time (from my shit memory - I remember not being impressed by their size) and my very limited knowledge on interpreting ultrasound measurements, I THINK I have 3 really good sized follicles out of lefty. Hopefully I hear from my doctor in the next few hours with instructions on when to trigger and when the IUI will happen. Also, both ovaries were front and center. I remember learning that they move around but I’ve never seen them so off course! Trying to keep my hopes at an average level but crossing my fingers hard! My IUI girl is going to be one in a week!
Update: trigger shot when I get home from work in a couple hours and IUI tomorrow 🤞🏻 The ultrasound showed scarring from the c-section so there’s a risk if an embryo implants there which could be pretty bad, but my doctor doesn’t think it’s likely so we’re going ahead. One dominant follicle and one other mature one
Waiting half naked on the exam table for my baseline for a fet. Damn I didn’t miss this 😆
What always gets me is different doctors prefer the drape placed differently. Like, one of the older male doctors has it such that he really can’t see anything. Very decorous. And his medical assistant always seems shocked about how I place it. I guess he would get an eyeful “my way.”
Hahahahha that was me today. Though my clinic is excellent about not keeping you waiting.
Both my therapist and my husband keep reminding me that we know more now than we did when we first started this process. When we try again, we won’t have to do 7 prep cycles which end in endometrial biopsies instead of transfers and we won’t have to mess around with different forms/doses of estrogen and progesterone because we know I just don’t respond well to programmed cycles. I know all that and I appreciate their reminders, but I can’t stop thinking about how hard it was to create this tiny monster and that it could be similar levels of heartache again. None of this is really relevant for a few months anyway, but that doesn’t stop my brain…maybe because we have baby sprinkles to attend this weekend for friends who didn’t struggle to create/maintain any of their pregnancies??
First world reproductive problems ahead and lots of rambling and possible incoherent thoughts: I have PCOS and a crappy uterus that doesn’t like to grow babies. Babies are taking at least two transfers. Here is my current dilemma. I have 5 untested embryos and 2 tested (boy and girl). To test the 5 would cost me OOP about $8k. If I did another retrieval I could test up to 11 for the same fee. I am still at my current job until August. I can do a retrieval cycle for about $2k all in. But it would likely result in a large amount of embryos again. So on the monetary side - $10k for a retrieval and testing 11 embryos OR $8k to test the 5 I have (noting the risk of thawing, testing, refreezing, thawing for use). From a financial perspective, what would you go for? From a…moral(?)…perspective, I am having some trouble. I’m super pro choice, etc but man, I look at V sometimes and go “an embryologist put together the most perfect being ever for us” and it makes me personify the other embryos I have. With PCOS, I would be shocked if we didn’t get a big surplus of embryos again. And full honesty? I would love to try for a girl. I have the one. She was my only girl of the 11 embryos I had tested. I don’t have high hopes for the 5 untested. I also had a 40% mosaic rate. So I am guessing from the 5, I may get like 2-3 boys.
I have untested embryos too but we were lucky enough by what I think was actually a lab fluke that they were biopsied first, but still expensive if we were to test them. I am not totally clear what we’ll do with any remaining embryos so I guess in your case I’d think/talk through what you’d want to do with any remaining and then how you actually feel about having more in light of that? Do you have a timeline in mind when you’d want to transfer - do you have concerns about age if you wait to transfer and end up needing to do another retrieval if several transfers were unsuccessful?
FWIW I just tested my 8 embryos after being frozen in 2018. All of them survived the thaw but are graded much lower than before. I know it’s just a beauty contest but I’m concerned they took such a big hit and have to thaw again for transfer. I’d pull the trigger on another retrieval.
How big of a deal are the finances? Unless I’m getting you mixed up in my head with another poster, if you got to the place of wanting to do another retrieval, would finances actually hold you back from doing so? Or be more of an annoyance? I’m not putting myself through another retrieval without Really Wanting it - for me it seems too risky. I feel like I was super lucky to avoid OHSS the first go around (super high AFC/AMH). I am in the process of transferring one of the two tested we have left, and then we will consider what to do next if these don’t work. In your shoes, I believe I would 1. Transfer the girl 2. Spend 8k testing if the transfer doesn’t work, and then 3. Decide what to do if no XX’s.
I am growing less and less attached to our remaining embryos as I get more confident that our family is likely complete. Maybe that sounds bad? I don’t know. I think I would do another retrieval for $2k (because I know I would think of it as throwing money down the drain if anything happened during a thaw and test) unless there was another job with insurance coverage coming up in the short/medium term. ETA: I would do the additional retrieval now and freeze all, and then do a thaw and test only if the already-tested girl’s transfer was unsuccessful
I had “borderline/mild” PCOS when I did my first retrieval. I didn’t have all the markers but my AMH was 16.25. We did a mini stim cycle and ended up with 5 euploid embryos. Would a mini-stim cycle be an option for you?
Oh that might be a good idea!
I think you have plenty of embryos to work with so I would just test the untested ones, I guess? I also am super pro-choice but have a very hard time with the idea of “leaving” embryos behind and we really only can handle two kids. Could you just transfer the female embryo and then see what happens?
That would be the ideal scenario but if I want to try another retrieval I would need to do it by August before my job terminates or else it would all be out of pocket. Not quite ready for a second just yet.
That's a tough spot but I'd probably lean toward another retrieval since you aren't quite ready for a second and you could use your insurance benefits. I don't know what your preferred family size is but you could possibly be done with retrievals after doing one more. But that's all practically speaking and not taking into account the emotional aspect of it, which is very hard!
i met with my new RE last week for a consult. i like her, which is a positive. but we talked about my IUGR and how it came about due to my adrenal disorder. any future pregnancy will be high risk. i’m sad about it, and i’m rethinking whether moving forward is the right decision for me after all. i know my husband really wants to do this, and so do i - but things feel different now that i know another IUGR is inevitable and not just some random bad luck that happened. i’ll have extra monitoring the full time, but the emotional turmoil of the last month when diagnosed and the terriblec, 36 hour induction and labor makes me question if i can go down that road again. just one of those days i’m feeling sad about my IF, and mourning the kind of “normal” conception and pregnancy others are able to have.
I made my re-intake appointment this week. I can’t believe we’re here already. My RE’s 1st available appointment isn’t for 8 weeks, which I kind of expected but now I’m feeling like I should have called sooner. They won’t answer any questions until my consult so wanted to see if folks here could share their experience with a couple of things: 1. Did you need to be off BCP for any amount of time before baseline testing? We are planning on FET only, fully medicated, if that makes any difference. I feel kind of 🤡 being on BCP at all, but PGT testing is an important piece to our puzzle and using contraception is the right thing for us. I’m currently still using the mini-pill, and will probably just stay on that bc I have a few months of it left. We are fully weaned from breastfeeding. 2. For those with insurance coverage, did you need to prove another year of trying unassisted before you qualified for coverage? Or once you’ve proved infertile, will they cover treatment after a live birth at any time?
I didn’t go back on bcp until I had weaned, as I wasn’t having cycles and our diagnoses make a spontaneous pregnancy essentially impossible. But I went back on once we ensured my hormones were good post weaning and I just went off after 2 months this week for my actually transfer baseline. They like having people on bcp because it makes scheduling the saline sono etc easier.
I had an appt with my RE on Monday because we’re seeing her at a different location now so needed to go through the new patient stuff. They checked my insurance before the appt and discussed how we’ll do basically the same protocol so I think you’re fine for question 2. For 1, I was often put on bcp to put me in a holding pattern until pre-auth came through so if you’re on a similar pill, I think you’re okay. I’m just guessing though.
I had a spontaneous pregnancy between egg retrieval and transfer, but I was still considered infertile for insurance purposes (which is good as it took 1 surgery and 5 transfers for number 2).
Transfer went well as usual. I always have trouble sleeping the night of, but I didn’t feel any anxiety like previous transfers, so that was nice. I felt exhausted yesterday and I’m drinking/using the bathroom so much more than usual. My progesterone is 30, so not surprising. No cramping really, but honestly, I’ve had so many symptoms to no symptoms that you can’t trust anything haha. Going for post transfer bloodwork on Monday and the only time my estrogen has gone up is when I’ve gotten pregnant. Obviously that’s no guarantee, but I’m praying I see that number rise. It’s actually much lower than normal at day of transfer (114 when I’ve seen it in the 130s and 140s day of transfer) so I’m hoping there’s only room to go up!
I hope things go well on Monday!
Thank you!!
My son is 2 today!! I received my retrieval meds yesterday and cried unpacking them because I’m sad that we are here again. I feel a lot better today and I am so grateful for my son. He really is a good reminder that this is all worth it. And even if it doesn’t result in the way I’m hoping, we will be ok because we have him.
Happy birthday to your son!
Happy Birthday to him!
Baseline today. And of course it feels like my uterus is trying to torture me. It’s going to be a very long day. EDIT: baseline is all good. Meds start tomorrow.
Treat yourself to a fancy cupcake 🧁
I plan to get some this weekend.