Ah, disappointment ... my old friend.

I was wondering how long my streak would last. I would say it's horrible and painful, but sadly it's just strangely familiar.

We will not have to worry about triplets, and we won't even have to worry about twins, we do have to wonder if we will even get pregnant this cycle - and if we do, if we'll just end up miscarrying again.

Instead of having 3 embryos of varying quality today, we only had 1 poor quality embryo.

Ideally, we would have had 3 6-8 cell embryos and instead 2 of our little babies arrested at the 2PN stage (in other words, they did not develop since Thursday - NOT AT ALL). They will allow those little ones to develop until day 6 and if they cleave at all they will freeze them for us, but if they don't (and they very likely won't) they will just remain arrested (dead). We are so sad about losing these 2 little ones.

So what we do have is 1 embryo. And yes, I know "it only takes one" but our 1 embryo only has 5 cells, when it should have 6-8, it is graded a 3 on a scale of 1-4, 1 being the best. The embryo has 50% fragmentation and it's GES score is 50 out of 100. Today we transferred back 1 poor quality embryo. From the research I've seen, there is an 8.8% chance of implantation (getting a positive pregnancy test) but I've had lots of those with little results. The data doesn't reveal anything about live birth rate when transferring an embryo like this - my guess is, it's not good. I guess it's a good thing we played it safe with a day 3 transfer, huh? (And yet another strike for monkey shop RE).

The one redeeming quality is that this embryo was derived from one of the CGH normal eggs - so that's good.

Here is our poor little embryo:

For those of you not sure what you're looking at, here's what our little embryo should have looked like today:

I'm feeling very tempted to just emotionally move on - so as not to go through a huge down if we don't get pregnant or end up having another miscarriage. I'm not trying to "think positive," I'm trying to not be entirely negative. Oh yeah, and the other "positive" thought I had today was "at least we have more information" (that's always what RE's say when women get bad news) but then I realized that I'm more confused now, than I was before.

The thing that I don't get is how in the world we've been able to get pregnant naturally EVERY MONTH WE'VE ATTEMPTED if we:

• can barely retrieve any eggs in an egg retrieval cycle


• come up short on number of "normal" eggs


• have 2/3's of our embryos (derived from NORMAL eggs!!) arrest before they even get a chance to implant - we get pregnant with abnormal embryos naturally, how come they lived long enough to survive the fallopian tubes and make it to the uterus??


• have a very poor quality embryo with high levels of fragmentation only 3 days after conception

HOW IN THE WORLD HAVE WE BEEN GETTING PREGNANT?

Oh well, all I can do now is lay around on bedrest. And let me tell you that changing into my pj's at 11AM and crawling into a warm bed in a dark hotel room ... seemed like a great place to start dealing with my sadness. This will definitely not help me avoid depression ... great.

If God wants this to be successful - He will certainly need to pull out a miracle.

I wish I had better news for you today.