No news means bad news

I'm not sure I was cut out for blogging....mainly because when things are going wrong it's sometimes too painful for me to sit down and write about them. As you can tell by the huge amount of time that's gone by since my last entry, a lot has gone wrong.

To sum up what's happened since my last post....

I did end up going ahead and transferring one of the normal CGH tested embryos to myself back in Oct. The result was a short lived chemical pregnancy.

Shortly thereafter, I transferred 3 blasts frozen from a prior cycle at a local clinic (so they weren't tested) to a gestational surrogate. She became pregnant with a singleton and things looked perfect at the first u/s. When we went back for a 9 week u/s a few days before Christmas, the Dr. asked me what was the farthest I had ever gotten. I told him a little over 8 weeks. He said, "well, this will be a new milestone for you if things look good." I said "yes, if things look good" and my husband said "STOP IT" in a stern voice (he thinks I'm too negative....gee, I wonder why?!). I was so anxious that I felt faint. As soon as the Dr. started doing the u/s, I knew something was wrong by the look on his face and the fact that he wasn't saying anything. Sure enough, the h/b had stopped. It was very similar to what had happened the one time with me and it was so hard to have all the same feelings come rushing back all over again. She had a D&C and I was relieved to at least find out that the embryo had several abnormalities.

My husband and I figured the next step was to transfer our one remaining tested embryo to the surrogate. The problem was both of us felt like we'd have better chances if we could transfer 2 tested embryos to her. It's such a big endeavor and expense to have her go out there to transfer one embryo. And, even though it's CGH tested, there is still a 20% chance an embryo that tests normal is actually not.

So, you guessed it, we decided to do fresh cycle # 7. We just returned from Vegas around 12 days ago. The cycle did not go well. I'm normally a high responder. I don't have PCOS and I'm never in the territory of huge numbers of eggs, but typically 20 to 30. Yet, this time, at my first appt. my E2 level was only 180 and there were only around 5 or 6 follicles as opposed to the 19 plus I usually have by that time and an E2 over 2,000. I don't know what happened except that 8 months had elapsed since my prior cycle and I'm now 38. Prior to the cycle, I had asked to increase my dose this time around but since my final E2 was 5,000-6,000 the times before, the Dr. didn't want to do that. I can't really blame him. Who could have seen this coming? The one thing I thought might have been done was testing at a local lab after a few days of stims. That way they could have caught the fact that I wasn't responding a lot earlier and corrected it sooner. By the time they discovered this, I had already done 7 nights of stims. Anyway, my dose was increased and I ended up having 18 eggs retrieved but only 14 mature and 11 fertilized. We ended up with 5 blasts to freeze that we're waiting for CGH results on. All 5 were Day 6 blasts (just like last time around) which is not encouraging to me. At any rate, I'm just praying 1 will test normal.

We had 2 out of 11 the first time we did the testing which means 9 were abnormal then 2 out of 7 the 2nd time which means 5 were abnormal.....so I'm very worried that all 5 that we have this time could easily be abnormal. Seeing how many abnormal embryos we've had in the past, I'm convinced we need high numbers to get a normal one or 2 and we just didn't have that from this cycle (and, yes, I know it's quality over quantity but I've tried the super low dose route once before to have less but presumably better quality embryos and no pregnancy resulted from any of them so the likelihood is that theory doesn't hold true with me; unless it actually is mainly an implantation problem which we won't know until we see how the surrogate does with tested embryos) .

My surrogate will be going to Vegas for a transfer in May.....at least of the one tested embryo we have frozen if none of the 5 come back normal.

Anyway, that's where things stand right now. I'd love to say something positive like "I'm sure things can only get better from here" but think I'd probably be kidding myself. :{