Saturday

Thanks for the support, guys. It really does mean a lot.

I am slowly (I hope) climbing out of the pit. At least, I have no more ice cream or cheap wine in the house, and I don't intend to buy any today! Hopefully I can move forward.

I am interested in what the RE has to say on Tuesday. I am not sure there is much more we can do, protocol-wise. This WAS supposed to be the protocol that improved the quality of my eggs. And I guess the real issue is that it may have done that! I don't know just how bad my embryos were before! But anyway, it may simply be a numbers game, in that I may still have a normal one in there somewhere or I may not. Well, we'll see what he's got. I think I've been on every protocol that there is out there, apart from the mixed clomid or femara pus injectables one. At least with this RE I have some confidence that he will go through my file and think hard about what the best next step is, rather than just saying "well, we have a lot of success with the long lupron protocol, and it's a numbers game, so let's try that again." Which, for the record, is the advice from my RE at NY Clinic on what to do next. When I've done long lupron twice with no success.

I will do the CGH again, I think. As long as it's still free and they haven't kicked me out of the study for having the worst embryos they've ever seen. As shocking as these results were, it was easier than doing a transfer. I didn't spend two weeks praying over my embryos, trying valiantly to keep a positive attitude and imagine them dividing properly and implanting. I didn't have a photo. I mean, sure, I worried over them and was anxious, but was nowhere near as emotionally tied up with them as with a regular cycle. And besides, getting that answer sure tells you WHY it isn't working, instead of worrying about whether that time you lifted something heavy in the 2WW caused an issue.

As for whether this could be caused by the sperm donor - it's not. It's me. Three RE's have told me that it's due to egg quality. 80%+ of chromosomal abnormalities are caused by the eggs not the sperm, and that's presumably using regular guys' sperm, not carefully selected donors (allegedly only 5% of guys who apply to be donors are eventually selected). And, the clincher to the argument, I'm on my fourth donor. If it was the sperm's fault, I would have got knocked up on changing from the first to the second donor. Or, you know, the second to the third. The donors are all proven with other pregnancies - I made that a criteria I absolutely had to have after the first one (who is now also proven - he just wasn't at the time I bought the goods).

And donor eggs? Yeah, I already went through that. I am not going to use DE. At least, not at this time. I want my own genetically related child. And if this next cycle doesn't work, I am stopping TTC and going to live for a few years without infertility treatments looming over my head. I am going to go to acupuncture school and radically change my life. I'll probably move into a small downtown condo in the city where the acu school is located, so that'll be a change of scenery too. Cutie acu said he had a dream about me that I'd quit all the treatment, meet a nice guy and immediately become pregnant the old fashioned way. He's not the first person to tell me that, either. It's probably wishful thinking, but hey, wouldn't it be wonderful! At least I might have the opportunity to meet different men at acu school / in the condo building's gym and get to have some s-e-x! Anyway, if at the end of school, once I am actually earning some money again, I decide DE is right for me, I will pursue it at that point. That's the beauty of DE - I can do it when I'm 43/44 because time is not ticking away so urgently. Right now I am so beaten down with treatments that I think I'll probably just live child-free. But we'll see. Hey, if I manage to marry a US citizen, that opens up the option of international adoption, so there's another thought.

I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that I know the odds of success on the next cycle are miserably low, but I'm going to do it anyway. With my eggs. I think I'll have plenty of closure if I get similarly bad CGH results, and will be able to walk away knowing that I tried everything.

Oh, and as for the badness of the results, I am less shocked by it now. Thinking about it, because most people either don't know their PGD or CGH results (maybe they are just told 3 abnormal + 2 normal and not the actual issues), or don't publicize them, and as most people don't even do PGD or CGH, we don't usually hear how abnormal the abnormal ones are. The only things we come across regularly are where women have a genetic test done on a miscarried fetus, where they will say it was trisomy 13 or whatever. So we come to expect that an abnormal embryo/fetus will only have one chromosome out of whack. But the ones that make it to 8 weeks and get miscarried are inherently stronger/better than the ones that don't implant. So it does make sense that the embryos that don't implant or which lead to chemical pregnancies have more than one chromosomal error. Not that I'm trying to put my results in a better light. They are terrible, I am well aware of that. But I am just not so shocked now that they each have multiple issues, as it does make some sort of logical sense.