Reclaiming the maiden aunts

Another ultrasound this morning, another early start. But the news is slightly better again, as it looked to me like I have three good follicles, as one on the left has caught up. All three had at least one measurement over 20mm, but the clinic uses an average of at least two measurements, so hopefully they average slightly less, and they'll let me stim another day. I don't want to trigger tonight! I want as much time as possible to enable the smaller ones to catch up (hopefully).

I'm pretty certain now that I'll definitely go ahead with the egg retrieval and IVF. Three, with potentially another two or three that could contain a mature egg, is OK. And I think an IUI definitely wouldn't have any chance with the medium sized follicles. Of course, it looks like I won't be doing a 5-day transfer, as was the original plan. I figure if there are 4 or fewer embryos they will want me to do a 3-day transfer, and I will agree, provided we can transfer all the embryos. If the purpose of a 5-day transfer is to select the best embryo, then I don't mind doing a 3-day if we put them ALL back. I thought I'd be freaked by the thought of 4 embryos, but hey, some of them won't be good so they won't all take. We'll have to wait and see if I actually get that many, though, which is somewhat unlikely at this point. Probably more realistically the best I can hope for is 3, and then we'll definitely transfer all of them.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about what to do if this cycle fails, and I think I have another IVF attempt in me. But that's probably my limit. I do have one frozen embryo, so I'll do an FET for that guy, and then may go back to doing IUIs after that - well, I'll discuss it with my RE so we'll see what he says. But IVF is too hard for me to keep gearing up time and again. Not to mention too expensive! And after that, once we get into next year, who knows. I have been pondering the whole donor egg and adoption route, but as I'm not ready to give up TTC with my own eggs, it is hard for me to be able to really come up with any plan. I just don't appear to be emotionally ready to embrace those options yet.

I also have been doing a lot of thinking about living child free. Which has made me think of maiden aunts. For some reason, my mom's side of the family had a ton of maiden aunts (well, great aunts) when I was younger, most of whom unfortunately have since died. How I would love to be able to sit down and have a good conversation with them now, though - I guess I come from stock that likes to be independent. When I was a child I used to pity their unmarried state, mainly because I pitied the fact that they didn't have children - the lack of a husband didn't seem such a big problem! And I always thought that they didn't marry because they didn't have the opportunity, but these days I know better. For example, one was a math professor. You don't get to be a math professor by accident, so I know now she must have chosen to be a "spinster" for the sake of her career because that was the only way to be able to devote herself to her chosen field. It makes me proud of these women and sad that the options available to women were so limited in their generation that they had to give up family life in order to succeed at work. And here we are in this generation trying to do it all, with varying degrees of success. I wish there was some way I could somehow reclaim the maiden aunts, because as old ladies although they were definitely a loved part of the family they were always loners, always a little bit sad If they were still around I'd love to enfold them in a huge hug and thank them for their sacrifices and choices, that enabled them to have careers and open up paths for the rest of us to follow, that set a great example, but which left them alone and lonely in their elder years. I wish I had some good way to honor them. I hope not to follow them, in that I hope to be able to have a family to love and to love me back, but sometimes I wonder if that's what fate has in store for me.