Yesterday turned out to be our transfer day. After much waiting, our doctor went over the results of how our little embies had been faring. As it happens, they weren’t faring too well.
We had 13 eggs fertilized, 7 by ICSI, 6 “naturally”. Of those 13, the eggs fertilized naturally ended up doing a bit better than their ICSI friends. Weird… It’s like the final push from my body and J’s body saying, “We’re doing this naturally”. We had no embies develop to 10-cell status, with most being 5s and 6s. We had a couple that were 8s (maybe some that were 7s–I wish I had researched what the numbers meant before we went), with most of them being Grade 3 frags. We had two little gems that were 8s (I think they were both 8s) with Grade 2 (naturally fertilized), so we made a game day decision: despite my doctor’s initial insistence of putting just one little embie in me, we decided on 2. My doctor didn’t fight us–he supported our decision and admitted he didn’t think the results we had were the ones we were going to have. He suspects this is the PCOS rearing its ugly head–lots of eggs, but lots of crap. My doctor hasn’t given up hope on them yet, though. He said we should let them keep growing and see if we have anything freezable.
So, I came home from the transfer PUPO, as the lovely wannabeayummymommy would say (Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise). I mowed down on some pineapple, chugged my Gatorade, played the next chapter of The IVF Belief CD for post transfer to pregnancy, and willed with all my might that these two sweet little embies are sticking around for the long haul. If I’m honest, I was kind of falling in love with the idea of twins before our doctor poo-pooed the idea in earlier appointments. I’ve got names, I had the whole movie playing in my head.
It’s taken me a bit of time to wrap my head around how different this process is to the IUIs we’ve done. I started falling into a negative thought spiral where I was wondering why on earth this would work when all those IUIs hadn’t, but J was right when he said this is global thermal nuclear war: this is a whole new ballgame here.
Proof #1: My left tube was blocked this whole time. Even after the first laparoscopy when he opened it, it was a dud. Any month that we IUI’d and I ovulated from my left side, we were out of the game. Statistically, most of our IUIs were done during a left sided ovulation.
Proof #2: Even though our IUIs involved multiple eggs, they weren’t necessarily the best ones. From the 23 that they took out of me during this IVF process, only 13 of them fertilized. Of the 11 that we tried fertilizing naturally, only 6 of them actually fertilized. So if my math is right (and the chances of that are slim), all things considered, we were dealing with a 25% chance of getting pregnant with the IUIs, supposing that we were dealing with an ideal egg released from the right side and with J’s best swimmers reaching it. That’s a slim chance.
Maybe I’m still trying to convince myself that this could actually work. The idea of being pregnant seems so so so foreign and so so so unattainable. I need to change this mindset. I need to focus on the positive, to visualize how amazing our life will be upon the announcement that we did it. WE DID IT. We’re going to have tiny Family Van’s and J’s running around the house and our life will be crazy (because we’re both a little crazy, let’s be honest), but it will be so filled with love and happiness.
That’s what I need to focus on.
-Pineapple-Eatin’-Visualizin’-Crossin’-All-She’s-Got Regular Van.
The Family Van 