...but I know it is over. I feel it like I felt it last time, and that's why I just had my second vodka tonic of the evening. That and because the IVF nurse told me to stop my progesterone and medrol pills and to call with my next cycle.
Day 3 was really lovely- I got a call on Monday that 13 were graded A and B and 8 were C or D. Then I read a statistic on an IVF clinic website that patients will lose 46-85% of their embryos from Day 3 to Day 5 because of the extended culture time and the fact that most will not be normal (abnormal number of chromosomes). That pretty much is in line with last cycle; we had 15 on Day 3 and by Day 5 we had only 3 that made it to blastocyst. Again, following the same pattern, this morning we got our Day 5 status update, and unfortunately 8 had arrested, and 13 remained but were all in morula or early blastocyst stage. None are at full blastocyst as of 730am on Day 5, which is where they were supposed to be. So, the lab cannot biopsy any of them for a transfer on Day 6, meaning my hope for a fresh transfer tomorrow is now gone. The best we can hope for at this point is a call tomorrow morning that at least one or two made it to blastocyst stage and are able to be biopsied and immediately frozen. But I just don't see how the chances that those biopsied will even be normal, given that one of our strongest embryos from last time had THREE COPIES of every chromosome. I am not seeing the positive side right now, and the fact that I will never know how many of the 21 were actually normal kills me. I suppose I should wait for tomorrow to come and go before I have the pity party, but I don't see the point in putting off the inevitable.
Assuming that I have no normal embryos and no transfer or frozen transfer from this cycle, that leaves me with a lot of questions about what it is we are doing and what we are trying to accomplish here. Part of me feels like this IVF thing is actually doing more harm than good to my body and eggs. Sure, I have a huge quantity of eggs, but it appears it is at the expense of quality. I don't really give a sh*t if I produce 21 mature eggs and only 1 out of the batch could potentially be normal; I would rather produce 5 eggs and have 2 normal. I am also asking a lot of the bigger questions like "why me?" and "am I being punished?" but I will attribute that to my Catholic upbringing and the teaching that God is punishing. My dear friend (we'll call her her Ms. Awesome Therapist) assures me that God does not cause us pain to teach us lessons, but only to help us out with something later in life. I like her thinking.
Consequently, I bought another book on Amazon as recommended to me by another girlfriend, called "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. Her mother passed away a couple of years ago and I know she has suffered more tragedy in her life than I personally have, so her recommendations hold a lot of weight.
I think the bottom line right now is that I am so tired, my body is so messed up, we have no money left, and we are mentally exhausted. However, the flip side is that if I'm not doing SOMETHING to help my quest to have a baby, then I feel even worse. It's like, I can't even take a break because the whole time I'll think that I'm wasting time and not doing anything. I am really hopeful that our doc will give us an even steeper discount for IVF #3 so we can move forward, or else we really really for real this time are going to have to give it a rest.
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