I finally crawled into bed last night at 2am. What was I doing that kept me up so late, you ask? Well, I was procrastinating. And because other things are always so much more fun than what you should be doing, I watched this week's American Idol episodes. (I LOVE the top 4 contestants!) What I should have been doing was to finish getting some stuff ready for a flea market today (in was all vain, I only sold 1 item for 1€) and I also should have been baking a "Sweet Dreams" cake (brown sugar, pecan/walnut & coconut flavored) for the friend I was to go to the flea market with. It's her birthday on Monday, but another friend and I will celebrate it (quietly) with her this evening.
And now for the main event:
Yesterday's clinic visit was basically like many of the others I've been to. The doctor asks how I'm feeling, do I have any symptoms and then asks me to disrobe from the waist down. I hop'up on the table-bed and she does an ultra sound of my uterus. The lining is 8mm, which is good. My ovaries are sleeping and there are no growing follicles, which means the Zu.menon is doing its job. I hop off the table, get dressed and we discuss the next steps. I am to continue taking Zu.menon and add Lu.gesteron (progesterone) suppositories to the mix. I will call the clinic on the morning of the 11th to make sure my embryos thawed alive and to find out a bit more precisely when my appointment time is. If the 2 embryos that were frozen together survive, I'll have them both transferred and then I'll still have one more for the next try before needing to do a third IVF round.
I asked the doctor why she thought this second round of IVF didn't work and why I am not pregnant? Especially when most factors seem to be quite good:
- my hubby's sperm and their count are good,
- my body is responding well to the medications/hormones and
- some of the eggs did fertilize,
but, once they are inserted back in me, no pregnancy happens. The doctor didn't really have much in the way of "why" I'm not pregnant. I guess some of us just have it more difficult. (My words.) She did offer up a few suggestions after looking back at my 1st and 2nd IVF notes.
1. When the embryos are created, the sperm and eggs are able to meet freely, maybe the sperm that found their way weren't up to the job. She did suggest that if we did another round of IVF, that we have ICSI (Intracytoplasmic sperm injection) done, that way we can be more sure of a fully healthy sperm meeting a fully healthy egg.
2. It could be that my endometriosis (as if I want to claim it as mine) is preventing implantation.
3. There is no reason, unexplained.
4. She didn't think my age or the age of my ovaries was effecting this. She went on to explain that if my ovaries were "old" or that I didn't have many eggs left, we wouldn't have gotten the decent number of follicles for retrieval (15 and 11). Also, if my body had produced mass amounts (30+) of follicles, then they might be concerned with some genetic defects or at least something wrong with the eggs themselves.
So, I didn't really get a clear answer as to why I am not pregnant, yet. I just hate my body sometimes. Or maybe it hates me. Either way, I'm not happy about it. And sometimes after visits like this, neither good nor bad in nature but just is what it is, I feel quite emotional. (It could also just be hormones too.) This time was one of those times. I was feeling a bit down about all this TTC and IVF issues. Then as I was in my car driving back to work, the following song by Mustach came on the radio and it just cheered me up immensely. I hope you enjoy it too.
Angel's Share
Ain´t no one gonna bring me down
´Cause I feel like flying
Here I stand in a rocking band
And I hope you like it
Angel´s Share
I give you what I got, I hope you care
It´s the best you wanted
The best you got it here
Yes means yes, but no means no
And I never broke it
I aint the one gonna let you down
My word is spoken
Angel´s Share...
Ain´t no one gonna bring me down
´Cause I feel like flying
Here I stand with my rocking band
And I know you like it
