Heartache

I found myself sobbing yesterday for my dear friend Brenda. Who has just completed her closure cycle with a negative pregnancy test. Although Brenda and I live in the same state, we certainly do not live near each other. I have followed Brenda's story for years, and I finally got a chance to meet her (and her husband) in person in October of last year at CCRM in Colorado.

I have wanted this so badly for her, but now my heart is broken. I know that she will begin a new journey in light of this, and that this is not the end of the road for her, but it definitely is a huge loss - one that deserves much attention, grief, consoling, and compassion.

If you're able, head over to her blog and give her some much needed comfort.

2 Corinthians 1:3-5: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.

My blog's namesake

This video is quite intimate.

I thought about not sharing it, but then I realized, that this is **why** I started blogging about our infertility in the first place - to help get the word out there that infertility affects a lot of people and it's extremely painful.

(Ok, let me interrupt to say - no, they did not pick a very flattering still for me, now did they? Argh! My 15 minutes of fame and I've got the ugly cry ... great!)

This excerpt is from my October 2008 New Life Weekend, when I originally posted these words, I just shared the words, but here I post my heart.

At the end of the weekend they asked the attendees to write a letter about what the weekend meant to them, during the weekend I really wanted to get unstuck from dealing with the idea that my husband and I might never have children, here I share how the weekend impacted me:

New Life Weekend: Wise Old Man from New Life TV on Vimeo.

I think the hardest part about watching this video for me is knowing that back then I was under the impression that I only had a very short window of opportunity to conceive - thinking that I was quickly headed to POF. Now, given that my mom went through menopause at age 36, it's still very likely that I could go into menopause prematurely, but given that CCRM has told me that my AMH is very high - it's likely I won't go into early menopause ... and the end of this roller coaster is nowhere in sight. I was kind of looking forward to a limited window of suffering.

But in reality, I too can make a decision to close that window and end the suffering - I'm not passive, it doesn't have to "happen" to me.

The door is not shut yet, Berilac and I have talked about it and prayed about it, and we spent some time talking with Dr. Schoolcraft about the results of our most recent huge embarrassing failure of a cycle ... Next stop: Denver. I will join the ranks of the infertile elite and cycle at CCRM.

I guess I'm not getting that minivan, huh?

Officially negative

I can't begin to describe what the past 9 days have been like. For the first few I wasn't even able to answer phone calls, much less talk to anyone. I cancelled all my plans and just sat on the couch staring at the TV. It wasn't until I needed to get back to work 4 days after the transfer that I finally took a shower.

My emotions have ranged from despair to anger (notice that there's no hope on that scale of emotions ... yes, luckily I took Anniep's suggestion of dealing with the poor results sooner rather than later - and that really helped me to cope with today's call) I had no idea this journey would take me down these roads emotionally. I never knew life could be so tasteless, so sad, so dark. I honestly can't tell you one thing, one activity that brings me joy - I think this is depression.

We took a blood pregnancy test today and it came out with the big goose-egg, so we appreciate your prayers but I guess there isn't one who is righteous among you ;-) just kiddin'. For those of you that don't understand what this means - this cycle has officially ended with a negative pregnancy test.

I am angry with God and I'm really doubting my ability to hear Him. I feel like we have weighed every decision against the Word, I feel like we have prayed, sought wise counsel, and let our community in to share the burden with us. We have purposefully made decisions that were not selfish nor in our best interest to have a baby (or seven) but rather we chose to honor God and make choices that would keep our integrity in tact.

• When a woman has had a miscarriage she is encouraged to wait 3 cycles before trying again - we could have been impatient and started the very next cycle - but 4 times we didn't.
• When we had 7 mature follicles in an injects/IUI cycle we were at risk for a high order multiples pregnancy - some women would still proceed with the cycle and do selective reduction of fetuses in order to bring the count down to "tolerable" number ... we cancelled the expensive and emotionally trying cycle to avoid this.
• When 4 specialists agreed that the solution to our fertility problems was to use genetic testing on embryos we declined and did our research - finding a very expensive, very time-consuming treatment (genetic testing on oocytes) that didn't give us the best chance - but it allowed us to address some of our problem, while at the same time allowing us to sleep at night with our decision.
• When we just wanted to move forward with pregnancy attempts - we took a step back, knowing that the genetic testing on oocytes would take the better part of a year. Rather than jumping back into the process like we wanted to - we exercised patience, a year of it. (Seriously, you'd be hard pressed to find a woman who is trying to conceive that would willingly wait a year to attempt pregnancy - ok, unless she had faced a molar pregnancy but in that case she risks getting cancer if she tries before a year is up.)

For the last 9 days I've been asking God "why?" ... I have been battling with the rationale that if I do everything right then God will give us a baby ... but that's just not true. If God is going to bless us with children, it will be in His time and in His way.

But I still wonder why the heck we went down this long (albeit seemingly pointless!) road. Berilac and I don't know the answer to that but what we do know is that we have incredible peace about the decisions we've made thus far and we are humbled that we have chosen to honor God when the temptation is so great to try to take this situation into our own hands.

When God says no, the Word indicates that the response is to praise Him while we continue waiting. We believe that our actions thus far and our attitudes - are praise to Him! So now we breath in and out, put one foot in front of the other, keep on marching ... and see what tomorrow brings.

Oh, and thank you so much for the many, many comments on our last post. They were inspiring and brought tears to my eyes on so many of these past 9 days where I could hardly move. Thank you for your love and encouragment, thank you for your prayers.

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.

Tomorrow's the big day!

When I called Berilac and told him the fert report yesterday the first words out of his mouth were: "congratulations mommy!" and then he asked ... "are we having triplets?"

Sadly, the answer is almost certain to be no. Some stats:

• 50% of embryos derived from CGH normal eggs will not survive to day 5.
• 10% of CGH normal eggs are not, in fact, actually normal
• The inconclusive egg has a 50/50 shot at being normal.
• There is a chance that the sperm selected were not genetically normal.
• There is a 1-2% chance for triplets when you transfer 3 day 3 embryos.
• 25% of day 3 embryos make it to live baby.

But who knows? God is in control and He's bigger than numbers ... if you have a doubt, check out what my AMH was in March and then see how much it grew by October!

Last night when Berilac announced his arrival home he shouted: "daddy's home!" It was so cute! We both were in awe last night just thinking about the fact that we have 3 little babies up in Sacramento. Their gender, hair color, predispositions ... all already determined. Our little ones are waiting for us!

We talked a bit about how many we're planning to transfer and from what I understand we will have very little time to make the decision. They will tell us how many we have and at what growth stage they are at ... and we are conducting the transfer within 15 mins of learning this information ... at least, I think that's true??

I just hope that Berilac doesn't cave when the monkey shop RE suggests we only transfer 1 embryo ... yeah, those babies are best off in my womb ... so hand them over!

Tomorrow's schedule:
7:00AM: McDonald's breakfast (some ladies swear by this practice - greasy foods help the embryos stick!)
8:00AM: Arrive at clinic for transfer prep
8:30AM: pre-transfer Acupuncture
9:00AM: TRANSFER!
9:30AM: post-transfer Acupuncture
10:00AM: hang out, lying flat for a bit.

Then we head to our nearby hotel for 48 hours of bedrest, complemented with fresh pineapple ... if you don't know about this, don't ask and if you do ... I've been waiting for months to chow down on some pineapple - so although I know it's a bunch of baby dust heresay (although there *is* a bit of truth to it) ... I want my pineapple!

In the afternoon sometime, I'll let you know how our very first transfer went. Here's hoping those little babies will get all tucked away for a long 10 month nap.

Operation Fertilization ... Successful!

Yep, you read that right ... Praise God!

All three eggs successfully fertilized and today we are the proud parents to three little zygotes (2PN status) ... and it gets better ... they have all developed just past that point and have released their second polar body. (Basically this means that they are further along in their development then they should be - which from all the research I've done, is much better news than worse news).

Our three little em-babies will be tucked safely away in their incubators until Saturday morning where we will get an update on their progress. We should have three nicely developing embryos to transfer on Saturday.

Berilac and I are beside ourselves with joy.

Last night, I sent a prayer request email to many friends and family (and many blog friends too) and the response was overwhelming - this journey really makes you feel isolated and today I feel surrounded ... so thank you for your prayers, your love, and your support.

Between now and Saturday we need to decide how many to transfer and tomorrow, since I won't have any embryo development news to share, I'll share our thoughts.

Thank you again for your overwhelming out pour of love.

***

And as a side note: it feels so nice to finally report good news - wow is it different. I hope this trend continues.

Operation Thaw ... Successful!

Word on the street is ... that all three of our eggs survived thaw!!

YIPPEE!!!

And all 3 were successfully inseminated with ICSI.

The collection this morning went well (obviously) and tomorrow we find out how many actually fertilize and have a chance at life.

Berilac and I are both thrilled.

Please continue to pray for our three little ones.