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Special jewelry my friends have sent to help me remember the journey, our babies, and our incredible support network. |
Time I woke up: 8:55 am
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Special jewelry my friends have sent to help me remember the journey, our babies, and our incredible support network. |
Time I woke up: 8:55 am
After three weeks and two days that somehow flew by but also seemed to take forever, Richard and I returned to our fertility clinic. (Recall that after two promising betas, they told us to go live our lives for a bit. This was definitely weird after going for frequent monitoring and bloodwork, but we managed to fill the time. I spent quite a bit of the time questioning potential symptoms--"Was that a cramp?"--and had one scare with a small amount of spotting when I finished my run one afternoon (it was fine and actually normal)).
To cut to the chase, the news today was all good. Our ultrasound tech found the heartbeat quickly, and the measurements all looked great! Based on my treatment cycle, I hit 8 weeks pregnant today, and the baby (yes, there's a BABY!) is measuring 8 weeks + 2 days with a heart rate of 167. (I told some people 166 because I apparently forgot...but the paperwork said 167.) The baby is about the size of a gummy bear.
When we met with the nurse after the ultrasound, she told us we were kicked out of the fertility clinic and off to the regular OB/GYN (you know, the doctor where people who get pregnant in less...complicated?...ways go from the beginning). She gave us a graduation bag, which was exciting but also made me feel self-conscious because I have watched so many people carry those bags out of the clinic and felt like I was being punched in the gut. I made Richard carry the bag, and we skedaddled through the waiting room and out of the clinic as quickly but inconspicuously as possible. (It was probably neither quick nor inconspicuous, to be honest.) Then, we went to Whataburger because that's our most frequent post-fertility clinic breakfast stop.
As fate would have it, my annual visit to my OB/GYN was scheduled for 9:40 this morning, so I hand delivered our graduation papers--including a letter from my RE that began, "It is my pleasure to refer Kimberly for routine prenatal care"--to my doctor today and set up my next ultrasound and appointment. After 3.5 years of routine checkups and bloodwork, procedures, and surgery to see what the heck is going on (which remained unexplained, but we ruled out a bunch of stuff), he is ready and excited for this next adventure.
For the rest of my day, I wore the graduation cap that Maryanne and Josephine bedazzled for my LSU graduation party, and it was the perfect accessory for graduating from the fertility clinic. Since I work from home, nobody really saw it, but I did wear it to my therapy appointment. (And somehow managed to get some work done despite having three appointments!) Here's a photo of me wearing the hat and using a "clear skin" Snapchat filter because I have been picking at a spot on my chin.
So, this is all pretty cool. I don't have pregnancy symptoms other than some tender breasts, mild cramping, and wanting to take 4 naps per day, but I am reminding myself that some (many?) people reach this point in pregnancy without having any symptoms or even knowing they are pregnant. We still have a ways to go--as my OB/GYN said today, we won't worry as much after 13 weeks, but we really won't stop worrying until the baby is born. Then he quickly corrected his statement and said we won't stop worrying until the baby is done with college. That's about what I had gathered independently.
Our next steps are ultrasound and bloodwork in two weeks (10/13) and a visit with the OB/GYN in about three weeks (10/21). Until then, my job is to stay hydrated, eat well, and not stress. I'm going to give it my all and hope that my best is good enough! We are excited and grateful for lots of support and prayer while we wait.
Something that made today great: It's pretty tough to top graduating from our fertility clinic.
Time I woke up: 6:40 am
After the good news on Friday, I took home pregnancy tests every morning when I woke up (that's first morning urine, or FMU) to make sure I was still pregnant. While a common practice, this is not a best practice for many reasons including that the darkness of the line is indicative of the concentration of HCG...but only to a limited extent. My lines were looking good, and I got what's called a "dye stealer," which is supposedly when the test line is darker than the control line because it has stolen some of the dye that would've gone to the control line. I don't know how true all of that is.
What I do know is that the amount of dye stealing leveled off, and I spent some time going down Google rabbit holes to compare pictures of other people's pregnancy tests and HCG levels to try to guess where mine was. I do not recommend doing this, but for full transparency, I now have a photo album on my phone called "Other People's Pregnancy Tests." I also have an album of photos of my own tests, appropriately titled "FET #3," but despite my openness about infertility and other intimate matters, I have a personal policy that prohibits posting pictures of things I peed on to my social media/blog. So, you'll just have to trust me on these.
On Friday morning, I calculated that my HCG would be around 824 if it was doubling every three days and 1308 if it was doubling every two days. In some photos, tests that looked like mine aligned with HCG around 1000. In others, tests that looked like mine were in the 500 range. Still in others, tests that looked like mine had HCG levels around 2000. So, I didn't know what to expect, but I kept hoping and praying for a healthy rising beta.
My blood result yesterday, about 99 hours after Friday's beta? 2459. Woah. This number doesn't have any 3s in it, and I have no musical recommendations based on this number, but I guess 2459 means something to me now!
I found out my result early by stalking my patient portal, and I even wondered if there was the slim possibility of a mix-up. When my RE's assistant called an hour later, she read me the same number. This time, I responded more professionally than I did when she called with our preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) results. (It probably helped that I knew what to expect.) She told me to continue all of the medications and that my RE wanted to see me around 7 weeks, so September 29 or 30. Naturally, I picked the earlier date, but it's still over three weeks away.
While I recognize that not needing to go back to the RE's office is probably a good thing, it feels a little weird to have weeks to wait after biweekly monitoring appointments for egg retrievals and IUIs. This is just one way that infertility has warped my ideas about what pregnancy is like. Pregnancy has been so difficult for us to achieve that it's hard to imagine just sitting and letting a baby grow, but that's exactly what plenty of people do. In fact, many people might not even know they are pregnant at this point (five weeks today!)
This seems to be our most promising transfer yet, so I'm remaining hopeful and dare I say allowing myself to get a little excited? I don't have any major symptoms but am definitely grazing and snacking more than usual. I'm not complaining yet, but I'm definitely going to have to find ways to stay busy for the next few weeks. There's plenty of knitting and work to do, and I'm not one to turn down a nap either. In other good news, my RE said I could run as long as I paid attention to my body and stayed hydrated. I am super hydrated, and so far run/walking is working for me.
Fingers crossed for rising betas and a growing baby!
Something that made today great: A visit to Buc-ee's!
Time I woke up: 7:45 am
I scheduled my appointment for 7:30 am, which is when my clinic opens. They close at noon on Fridays, and they told me I would hear something before they leave. At 9:58 am, my phone rang. It seemed a little early for results (though I learned at my support group last night that the actual running of the test part only takes 18 minutes), but surprisingly, my RE was on the other end. It's always a little awkward when anyone from the clinic calls with an update because I try to play it cool and end up sounding a little like Eeyore. Especially because I know that my RE is the one who calls with bad news, I was caught a little off guard that he was calling. Fortunately, the news was good.
So much time has passed since my last update that I had to go back and read my last post to know where I left off and what I said. I left off at the egg retrieval on June 21, where we retrieved four eggs. Writing this all now seems a bit anti-climatic compared to building up through blog posts with each update, but I'll try to keep it interesting.
Early on June 22, the morning after the egg retrieval, the embryologist called to let us know that all four of our retrieved eggs were mature and had fertilized. This was, of course, the best possible scenario, so we were thrilled to get the update. They reminded us that our next update would be after day 6 (June 27), so I expected an update on the morning of June 28.
On the afternoon of June 27, the embryologist called with an update. Fortunately, I did not have time to remember that the call was coming early; otherwise, I might have started spiraling and assuming everything stopped growing. Instead, she had a very happy update: three of our embryos were graded highly and had been biopsied and frozen. The fourth embryo had arrested (stopped growing), so three was the final update. I try not to put too much weight on embryo grades, but it was nice to hear the good news.
The next stage was to wait for the genetic testing results to come back. The wait on this part is between one and two weeks, so I was not exactly sure when we would have news. As a refresher, the rule of thumb is that less than half of embryos sent for testing come back normal. In the three cycles where we froze and tested embryos, we'd gone 0/1, 2/3, and 0/1, for an overall of 2/5.
It turns out the correct answer was July 6. My RE's assistant called to let us know that all three embryos tested normal. My response?
"Holy shit."
Then I quickly regrouped and tried to be professional.
"Well that was really unlikely, but it was definitely what we hoped for."
In the meantime, I had started my next menstrual cycle, so I had already called my RE's office to initiate a transfer cycle. We scheduled the transfer for August 18. As with other IVF things, the first step was to take birth control pills. We later added Lupron shots, and sometime after that, Richard got COVID, and I got COVID five days after that (despite my best effort). Fortunately, the COVID situation only set us back five days instead of requiring us to cancel the cycle. I stayed on the Lupron for five extra days. Next, we added estrogen patches and tablets, stopped the Lupron, and added PIO. Thankfully, our nurse gave us a printed schedule that made it easier to track everything.
We transferred the embryo last Tuesday (August 23). Our RE said the embryo looked great, and he was excited about the expansion. I did a bogus job preparing my bladder for the transfer. This was a rookie mistake; I should have started drinking sooner. I ended up with a full belly and mostly empty bladder, but fortunately, it wasn't so empty that they had to backfill my bladder. I do not fully understand what backfilling a bladder entails, and I don't think I want to know. What I do know is that I am glad that didn't have to happen. Here's our hopeful future child!
I was surprised to check my blog and see that my last post was just over a month ago. More than ever, the weeks are flying by. I feel like I have not caught my breath in months...whew.
I left off at the end of May, which was when we heard back from the ERA that I was prereceptive and needed additional progesterone before transferring a frozen embryo. Since we used one of our euploid embryos in the October 2021 FET, we were left with one euploid embryo in the freezer, so we wanted to go for another egg retrieval first. Despite our luck thus far, we still hope for multiple children. Also, it might take more than one to achieve even one live birth.
Since we'd been in the IVF game for a while, we had to redo a bunch of paperwork and consent forms, which felt weird and like pouring salt in the wounds, but we did not have to rewatch the videos about how IVF works. The cycle began with birth control, as all of the others have thus far. I started the stim shots on June 8, and our protocol was a little different this time. In the past, we did Lupron (10 units) and Follistim (250) in the morning and Lupron (10 units), Follistim (125), and Menopur (150) in the evening. For this cycle, we dropped Lupron entirely and did Follistim (300) and Menopur (150) in the evening for the shots. In addition, I took 100 mg of Clomid and 10 mg of Provera in pill form.
Our monitoring appointments went like this:
Richard and I started dating when he was in medical school. Usually, he had class in the morning and would study all afternoon, but some afternoons, he had to go to small group meetings where he would learn about the parts of being a physician that are not necessarily hard science. One example is that they had a small group (perhaps a few, actually) where they learned about how to deliver bad news and difficult diagnoses.
Most of us never have that kind of training.
I have been quiet lately partially because life has been a blur (traveling and writing and birthday and egg retrieval and dissertation defense OH MY!) but also because I got pretty worn out with constantly delivering bad news. I have received a lot of affirmation for sharing our infertility story, so I do believe it helps people. However, I was talking with some online friends in an infertility group chat recently, and we started discussing our reasons for being public (or not) about our infertility. Someone asked those of us who had been public if we ever regretted that choice. I said I did not regret it--and I do not--but this conversation was when it finally clicked that this whole experience would have been cleaner and less emotionally draining if we had a clear path from egg retrieval to transfer to baby. Instead, we ended up on the less clear, less direct path...and sharing bad news constantly is exhausting. Repeatedly getting bad news is also exhausting.
Compounding the effects of receiving and sharing bad news is that people primarily tend to share their good news on social media and keep quiet about the moments that are uncomfortable or unpleasant. There were times when I felt like every pregnancy announcement was like being punched in the face. I recently compared myself to one of those inflatable Bozo Bops that have sand or water in the bottom to weigh them down a bit. You can punch them repeatedly, and they pop back up. After a while, air leaks out little by little, and they eventually stop bouncing back up unless someone comes along to blow them back up. No matter how cute, smart, or wonderful other people's children are, how excited I am for other people's pregnancy announcements, or how grateful I am for most of the circumstances in my life, Richard and I are on a difficult and often lonely path. Sometimes it feels like it would be easier to stay deflated rather than getting blown back up and punched some more. Clearly, we have chosen to keep getting punched, and we hope that will pay off eventually.
After the blighted ovum miscarriage in January, Richard and I decided we needed to take a break from fertility treatments. The arbitrary deal I made with myself is that we would not pursue any treatments until I scheduled my dissertation defense, and I mostly stuck to that deal. In May, we did the endometrial receptiva analysis (ERA) to see if I needed a different amount of progesterone before a frozen embryo transfer. This involved taking estrogen tablets and progesterone shots, then my doctor took a biopsy of my uterine lining. We had the procedure on May 20, and it was about as delightful as it sounds. Fortunately, it was quick. What was more painful than the biopsy was seeing "1-2 miscarriages" checked on the form as the reason for the procedure. Even though I knew that was the reason, seeing it on a medical form made it feel more "real." It's tough to explain.
I scheduled my dissertation defense date (June 24) on May 19, so we told our doctor at the ERA that we were ready to try to bank some more embryos as soon as possible. He said he would review our file and see if there was anything else we should check out. We were able to move forward with the IVF cycle in June. Since I have several updates, I am going to break them up across three posts. I am not sure how far apart they will be, but I will share about IVF Cycle #5 in my next post and next steps in a third post...so stay tuned.
The ERA results came back after about a week and a half. I am what they call "prereceptive," meaning I need additional progesterone before transferring a frozen embryo. I was actually kind of relieved to know that there was a problem we can do something about. Knowledge is power, after all. We do not know for sure that being prereceptive caused the chemical pregnancy after we transferred a euploid frozen embryo in October, but it is possible.
Speaking of the chemical pregnancy, today was the due date for the frozen embryo that we transferred in October. Seeing all of the babies that have been conceived and born since we started trying to conceive in 2018 is difficult, but up until this point they've been hypotheticals. "If I'd gotten pregnant in ___, we'd have a ___ year-old now." Although the pregnancy was short-lived, it was very real, and I'm apprehensive about how it is going to be to watch the babies born this month grow. This will repeat in September when the fresh embryo we transferred in December would have been due, and I imagine it will repeat for years and years to come. The due date calculator says we would meet our baby today, but that was not the case (and hopefully will not be the case - I have stuff to do before I die!)
As I mentioned, this is the first of three installments of updates. Spoiler alert: I am not pregnant. But maybe before the end of the year?
Something that made today great: Sarah's Laughter infertility support group!
Time I woke up: 6:50 am