Obsessed with CCRM

I regularly get emails from women who are curious about our take on CCRM and whether or not they should consider using them. And everytime, I can tell you for certain, that I sing the praises of CCRM ... and not just because they knocked me up good and strong on the first shot. No, I recommend CCRM because of the research that they do, their cutting edge technology, their staff, and their professionalism. If I had to guess I would bet many fellow CCRM infertiles (those that were successful and those that heartbreakingly weren't) would agree with me. After working with three other previous clinics and RE's ... it was easy to see just how superior CCRM really is. One of my favorite things to relay is that I feel like my CCRM IVF nurse knew more than most of my previous doctors!

During this successful pregnancy, since many folks in real life have known about our struggles, reasonably, they ask if it was a treatment cycle that worked ... and I'm grateful to be able to tell them that we were fortunate enough to be able to cycle at the best clinic in the country.

There's one more reason CCRM has been on my mind lately ... I remember when we were going back and forth with Schoolie as to whether or not doing a fresh cycle or doing a PBB CGH frozen FET would be our best bet and he said "Sure, we can get you pregnant on a fresh cycle, but I'm pretty sure you'll just miscarry again" ... well, we prayed about it and felt like trying the fresh cycle was the way to go. When Schoolie said those words to me I thought 'man, I hope we can prove you wrong!'

On 3 days past transfer, when we got the call that 'today will be the transfer day' I asked many a question about embryo quality, but my questions went unanswered. I have to think that things weren't going as well as they'd like (hence the day 3 transfer) and so in an effort to keep me optimistic they didn't share the information. Looking back, I'm grateful for that too! You see, I waited to schedule this regroup with Schoolie until AFTER the making it out of the first trimester, until AFTER getting good genetic screening results, until AFTER the big 20 week ultrasound ... so that I could feel confident about this pregnancy and not get discouraged if he were to tell me that my embryo quality was crap ... I think that if he said that, it might make me insecure about the health of the baby growing inside of me. And so we've waited.

So now, here we sit, 5 days away from our regroup call with Dr. Schoolcraft and our opportunity to say 'told you so!' (not really ;-)). Actually, I am hoping to find out what happened with our other 8 embryos, what stage/quality they were at on our day of transfer and how they developed up to day 5 and/or day 6. I'm wondering what he thought of our egg quality and embryo quality. I'm wondering if he'd change our diagnosis after seeing us through an entire cycle. I'm wondering what he would suggest for us in a future cycle ... or would he recommend we not 'fix what ain't broken'. Really, the data is a 'nice to know' but my heart lies in finding out what happened to our little embryos that didn't make it ... even being in the middle of a successful pregnancy, my heart breaks for what we lost.

Two nights ago I guess I couldn't get Schoolie off the brain. I had a nightmare about our call. It just had to do with having him on the line and then my 45 minutes of unsuccessful attempts to conference call Berilac into the conversation. It was less about being unable to correctly dial my husband's number (for 45 minutes ... according to my phone display in my dream) and more about feeling stressed that the doctors are superior and I can't even dial a phone ... I think this concern stems from just wondering if they discarded our embryos because maybe they didn't meet their "standard" ... when I would have frozen everything. Although I know that only 25% of couples make anything to freeze on a given cycle, it was heartbreaking to land in the 75%. And I guess, if the dream tells anything, I feel out of control about that.

I'm hoping and praying that Tuesday's call will bring me some peace about how the cycle actually went down.

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On another note, yesterday, for the first time ... I felt the baby kicking my bladder! One second I don't have to go pee, then the next, I was shocked that I did ... then the pressure went away ... it was AWESOME!