The past few days have been eventful and uneventful all at the same time. I got my period the day after hearing the news about our embryo, and I got really excited thinking we would be proceeding right away, but then I had my followup appointment with my doctor and I left the conversation feeling a little deflated.

The most important fact is we have our one embryo and this is absolutely cause for celebration! We still have a shot at this! We’re still in the game! Before I go over my discussion with Dr, J, I just have to highlight that because this is really great news! However, my conversation with Dr. J was a little sobering and depressing…

We went over my history and discussed all my previous pregnancies. We talked a lot about my first pregnancy and how even though our son didn’t survive, it was due to a rare condition of pregnancy, Preeclampsia, and not because of a genetic abnormality, so we know I have some good eggs left.  And because I carried him to 27 weeks, we also know I can carry a baby and my uterus works as it should. We also know from my hysteroscopy in 2012, that there are no fibroids or other growths or abnormalities with my uterus, and even with my c-section and previous D&Cs, I have very little scarring. This is all great news.

The bad news is we had 3 miscarriages after my first pregnancy and we know for sure that the last pregnancy ended due to a chromosomal abnormality, and Dr. J suspects the other 2 miscarriages were also abnormal. However, Karyotyping came back normal for both my husband and I, so the chances of us passing on a genetic abnormality is very unlikely. And Dr. J also said, that because of the normal karyotyping for my husband, and the fact that his sperm analysis was normal, it is very unlikely that his sperm would cause any chromosomal abnormalities. Furthermore, I’m not very old yet. I’m kind of on the cusp at 36 (soon to be 37), but with my last 3 pregnancies I was still quite “young” when I was pregnant at 33, 34, 35 and 36. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and yet it all points to me, or specially to my eggs. My AMH and FSH indicate low ovarian reserve for my age.  And the fact that even after a lot of stimulation medications, we only fertilized 11 eggs over 2 cycles, and only 4 made it to blastocyst, and of those, only one was normal, indicates that my eggs are extremely poor quality. So, if our one shot doesn’t work and we don’t implant or something else goes wrong, we won’t have too many options left. Dr. J said we could do all this again, but because we’ve gotten pregnant quickly and easily on our own, the only reason for IVF is for the PGD results. If we did choose to do all this again, we wouldn’t do high stim cycles since Dr. J believes they didn’t really help me and may even have affected egg quality, so we would do 3 or 4 low stim cycles with just Chlomid and retrieve 1 or 2 eggs per cycle over several cycles in order to get enough to go to testing. Or we could go back to trying on our own since we do get pregnant on our own, and hope to catch a good egg, or we could consider donor eggs. None of these options are really great. We’ve already spent so much money on this so trying IVF wtih PGD again with my eggs or donor eggs is overwhelming and I just don’t know how much more money we can and should throw at this, and I’m really not sure about donor eggs. The very thought of donor eggs makes me want to cry, but to try again on our own and hoping for a good egg would be like playing Russian Roulette. How much more loss would we have to endure if we went that route? So all in all, these are not great options.

So… talk about putting a lot of pressure on this one shot. My joy and excitement over our one special embryo was a little overshadowed by this reality check. However, Dr. J did encourage me to focus on the one embryo and not worry yet. The conversation was just to give me information, just in case. So this brings me to where we are now. I got my period 4 days ago, but we will not be proceeding this cycle. Dr. J wants me to have one cycle in between the retrieval and the transfer to fully recover from the high stimulation meds and retrieval to give us the very best chance at a successful transfer. So… here we are. More waiting. The good news is my cycles are very regular and typically on the shorter side at 26 days (give or take a few days), so I should expect my next period around January 6th. Once I get my next cycle, I will begin taking estrogen and progesterone to thicken my lining, and Dr. J said about 18 days later, we’ll do the transfer.

Now I just need to sit tight and wait. With my 6 year Wedding Anniversary on Monday and Christmas and New Years in there, it should help the time fly by, but there are also some big dates coming up that are going to be hard to deal with. We have 2 would-have-been due dates coming up:  December 20th and January 5th. December 20th would have been the due date for my third pregnancy. If things had been different, we could have been celebrating a first birthday along with Christmas this year. And January 5th was my due date for my most recent pregnancy. January 4th is my birthday. When I first learned of my last pregnancy and the due date, I thought to myself, this time it has to work out because the universe wouldn’t take that away from me on my birthday, would it? Well the answer is, yes, it would. I’m going to be another year older and still have no living children, and to know that if things had been different, I would have been holding my new baby on my birthday, is just crushing. I just don’t know how I’m going to deal with it. The only thing getting me through is knowing that God has given me a birthday gift in return. Our one embryo. Our girl. I should get my next period a couple days after my birthday, and if all goes well I’ll be pregnant again just a few weeks after that. Talk about bringing in the New Year with a bang! Please, oh please let this work!

Please let our last embryo standing, our girl, be the one!