A New Doctor

After our last failed cycle of in vitro we were left feeling pretty desperate. Our doctor at the University of Utah didn't seem too interested in communicating what the next step should be and we felt like maybe we just weren't in the right situation. I wanted to wait for at least 3 months before trying another cycle to see if taking all of the extra supplements/vitamins/and witch doctoring would help. While going through this wait we decided to explore another Reproductive Endocrinologist that I had heard about.(I have taught 2 students that have come from this doctor) We had a consultation with a Dr. Hatasaka at Reproductive Care Center in Sandy. He studied our case and gave us lots of options. He said that after looking at our previous cycles and the embryos we got he wouldn't recommend doing IVF with our own eggs again but that if we wanted to try one more cycle he totally understood and he would support us in that. He gave us lots of different options for using our own eggs: we could go with even higher doses of meds, we could do a low stimulation cycle, we could take human growth hormones, the list went on and on. After canceling our first cycle we did a high dose cycle and it really didn't seem to make a difference so we decided to do the low stimulation cycle. When doing this kind of cycle they expect to only get a few eggs but what they are finding is that usually they are the best eggs available during that cycle. Since we have diminished ovarian reserve and we don't get a lot of eggs anyway we decided that this would be the way to go. It's also a little cheaper. The base price is $7,000 vs $11,000 but it only includes 2 ultrasounds and you have to pay $450 for every extra ultrasound and if you get more than 4 eggs there is an extra fee. Well I definitely didn't think that would be a problem since we could never get more than 6 eggs even with high doses. So we decided to go for it. We have always had low estrogen which could indicate poor egg quality. But with this cycle they start you with a drug like clomid which also suppresses your estrogen levels. I was so freaked out when our estrogen levels were far below where they were before. They expect your estrogen to be at 200-300 per mature egg and the ultrasounds were showing 5-6 eggs and our estrogen was at 316. Our doctor stayed positive and said we only needed one good egg and he was surprised that we even had 5-6 showing up. We did end up having 2 extra ultrasounds and pushing out our egg retreival date for a couple of days. When we finally got to our egg retrieval they got out 7 eggs. 6 of them were mature and 5 fertilized normally. Then we had to wait for 3 days to see how they looked. They called us on Day 3 and said come down for our transfer that day. Surprisingly there was 1 embryo that was graded excellent, 2 graded good, and 2 graded fair. On our last go we only had fair-poor embryos so we were super stoked and hopeful. We transferred the excellent embryo and one of the good embryos. We grew the others to see if they could make it to the blastocyst stage. 1 of them made it and we were able to freeze it. The other 2 died before day 5. We had the transfer and I felt like I was pregnant. I started having weird dreams, was tired at unusual times, had to pee more often and had a general feeling of being bloated. I took a home pregnancy test 4 days before we were supposed to find out and it said positive. We were so shocked and excited, but the very next day I took another one just to be sure and it said not pregnant. Then the symptoms started to go away. I was so sad, but I was hoping I was wrong. I googled what a positive then negative pregnancy test could mean and it said it usually means it was an early miscarriage/chemical pregnancy. On Thursday we had a blood test to see if we were pregnant. If you are pregnant they like the level to be over 100. If you are not pregnant they want your level to be below 5. Ours was 8 which meant it was most likely an early miscarriage. They need it to be below 5 to make sure I didn't have an ectopic pregnancy. So just to rub in the fact that you are not pregnant you have to go and have another pregnancy test 2 days later to confirm that your levels dropped below 5. Hopefully this is a sign that we can get pregnant, we just need to right embryo. We have a follow up with the doctor in early April. Before this cycle he was recommending that we go to donor eggs. Because our embryos looked pretty good this time(he said they rarely see embryos that our graded excellent)he said he probably won't recommend going to donor eggs right away. We will see what happens.