A Transfer for Christmas

Holy buckets: December was pure insanity in this stork household! My last post was just a week into cycle meds and only 2 weeks before our date with sun and sand. I promise that I didn't stow away in some beach villa in the Caribbean, although now that I think about it...

The last week of November brought great news on the stork front. I had my baseline monitoring appointment to ensure that the Lupron was doing it's job before we started adding Estrace to the mix. The ultrasound showed a nice thin lining of 4.7 mm and two quiet ovaries. The amount of relief I experienced from those ovaries being quiet was immeasurable. Able to breathe easy again, I headed back to the daily grind with a little more estrogen in my system and a vacation on the horizon.

The week before vacation got a bit harried at work. I had a project that HAD to move forward before I left for a week, but the stars seemed aligned against it. I pulled every string I could get my hands on, threw my minuscule, low-ranking scientist weight around, begged those that would listen, and miraculously managed to get things moving at the very last second. I was full of profuse appreciation to the technicians on our team, and overfilled with TUMS from the heartburn of trying to pull it all together. With the project all safely tucked in for the week, Scott and I took off for a land of no cell phone reception or internet connections.

On the morning of our departure, we received a notification that the ship was delayed coming into port due to heavy fog. We took this as a sign that we needed to do more pre-vacation shopping and proceeded to buy entirely new vacation wardrobes. I couldn't help myself - all of the beachwear was calling out to me from under the flashing "CLEARANCE" signs in each of the stores we ventured into. Armed with our now overly-stuffed luggage, we boarded the ship in the late afternoon and promptly located a fruity drink.

At this point, I would love to tell you that we had a whimsical, care-free vacation over the subsequent 6 days, but that would be a lie. There were many wonderful moments, but the medication wasn't very friendly to me on the trip. I spent most of it feeling very nauseous, and at times, extraordinarily emotional. No one really wants their vacation to be outlined in fluctuations of feeling irrational frustration and hyperventilated sobbing. Lesson learned: I will avoid scheduling future vacations during periods of cycle medications. Just to be safe, I'll probably add two postpartum months to that list as well.

The day we arrived home, I had my second (final) monitoring appointment to see how my lining was doing at thickening up to receive the stork babe, make sure the ovaries were still behaving, and to check my hormone levels before starting PIO shots. Again, we received great news: my lining was perfect at 12-14 mm thick with a distinct triple stripe and two quiet ovaries. My hormones looked great as well, so I started PIO shots on the 14th. With only 5 short days to our transfer on the 19th, I wrapped up the last of my research tasks for the year(!) and headed out to TransferCity on the evening of the 18th.

This transfer was much different than the first: In August, we were doing a fresh transfer on day 6 (a Tuesday) while waiting for PGD results to come back on the embryos. The PGD results were delayed causing the transfer to be delayed into the evening, and the middle of the week schedule meant that I would be heading back to HomeTown and work the next afternoon. This time, we transferred a frozen embryo on a Friday, which meant an extra day and a half of relaxation in TransferCity before the long drive home. The transfer went perfectly, and the embryo looked fantastic. Everyone was impressed with how the embryo looked, and by mid-afternoon I was back in my hotel watching a movie and letting the little bean get settled in.

Now that we've done two transfers, I'm starting to get a handle on what to expect. In the weeks leading up to transfer, I have mild nausea, lets call it a 4/5. On transfer day, they put that lively little bean in there and somewhere around 6-8 hours later, we're at an 8 - the serious puking begins, heartburn ensues with any food that has flavor, and I'm so exhausted that I can fall asleep in mid-sentence. This was somewhat more intense following this transfer, so no one was surprised when we ended up with a nice solid positive line on the home pregnancy test 4 days after the transfer.

 For fun I did another one the next day too, which popped up noticeably darker as you can see. Day 6, the day after Christmas, brought our first beta hcg blood test with a nice solid result of 71 mIU/ml. On the 7th day after the transfer, we packed up the kids and went to a family Christmas party. I told Scott that I was starting to feel less nauseous and less fatigued, and that worried me a bit. Day 9 was Monday, the 29th, and our second beta hcg which yielded a result of 140 mIU/ml. Ideally, with a doubling time of 48 hours, we would have been looking for the result to be about 210, but some embryos have lulls and bursts in their development, so the clinic called me back for another test on the 31st to track how the bean was growing. The result was 70 mIU/ml - devastating. It seemed even worse that we were headed to the last family party that day, all the kids were gathered around closely and enjoying the holidays, so I didn't really have much for a quiet space to just feel bad about it. When the nurse called, I let a few tears out while I talked to her, but then quickly pulled it back together. I could only imagine how heartbroken and defeated Ellie and Matt would be when she called them.

It's now been 5 days since that call. The reality has sunken in: We have two failed transfers with two PGD normal embryos, and there are no more frozen embryos. I don't know what Ellie and Matt are considering, and I don't know if the RE is planning to do anything differently to try to find success moving forward. I'm sad and frustrated and worried. I want nothing more than a successful pregnancy for Ellie and Matt. I'm hoping that our clinic will give us something to hang our hope on.