Holy Crap, I Just Canceled Myself!

We had our 8:45am appointment with Dr. Pompy today. An U/S appt to see how the follicles were doing. On the way to the appointment J protested that he didn't want to do another IVF cycle after this one. That he was tired of "throwing good money at bad". Yes, his words. I protested that I wasn't ready to throw in the towel just yet but he voiced that if I wanted to keep trying that it would be on my own. Fine. And shall I look for donor sperm, too, while I'm at it? "No, I didn't say that". Me, paraphrasing, "Okay. So you want the privilege of being a parent but you don't want to write your 50% of the check to help us be parents?" OMG. It was a terrible and hurtful argument. Infertility hurts couples in so many ways: emotionally, financially, and then there are the physical considerations. The shots, the hormones swings, possibility of overstimulating, etc. It's endless. But arguments like this are poison. Toxic.

So today is something like day 8 or 9 of stims. I tender in the ovary region and seriously bruised from the lovenox.

A bit of history: recall that we started off with 12 follicles...but they found a cyst...so they put me on stronger lupron in order to make the cyst go away. Dr. Russian said that antrals vary. They come and go. This was in response to his finding 7 on our last U/S about a week or so ago. I panicked but he seemed to imply that the others would likely be coming back.

But they didn't come back.

Today they only found 7 follicles. One at 7mm, a few at 11 and 12mm, and one at 14.4mm. I expressed concern over the 7mm follicle that it might not be able to "catch up" to the others. Dr. Pompy said "it might" catch up. So in reality we only had 6 follicles to work with.

I was devastated. This was my worst cycle ever. I always wind up with more follicles than they think I'll have. Heck, Dr. Moustache would always find extra follicles in the OR when he was poking around with the retrieval needle.

Withdrawing the wand, Dr. Pompy said that he wanted to test my estrogen to see if it was high enough to proceed. He didn't seem enthusiastic about it given how many follicles had disappeared.

I asked a multitude of questions as to how they might have disappeared:

"I worked out quite a bit the last two months. Might this have caused this?"

"No."

"I was on lupron since February 8t. Could it have put my follicles to sleep."

"No." (I have my doubts about this. Honestly, I think this was the culprit.)

"Okay. I've never done a cycle with menopur before. Do you think the LH did something to suppress my follicles to the point of disappearing?"

"No." (There are docs that would argue in my favor)

What he did say is that he felt that I'd done quite well for my age up til now and that it was possible that in the last year that it's caught up with me.

"But what about the 12 follicles? 12 is more like what I normally produce." I protested. There was really no answer for this.

Dr. Pompy said that they'd call with E2 results and would let me know what dosage to take for my evening shot. He said that if my E2 was lower than 250 that I'd be canceled and we'd try again next month. If this were the case I'd trigger with my hCG to induce ovulation so that I could get the "ball on the road" as soon as possible, rather than waiting up to six weeks for AF to arrive.

So we left and we argued all the way home as to what to do. It just doesn't sit right with me that 5 of my follicles disappeared. This has never happened to me before. With our first two IVF cycles I had 12 and 15 (or was it 16?) follicles. We had fantastic retrieval & fertilization rates.

About 4:30pm they called with my E2 results. 445. I asked what sort of number this represented in the spectrum of typical results. "Average". Okay. So I have less than normal follicles for me, and my E2 is average.

Evening came and I took my shots as planned save for the menopur and lovenox. It wouldn't matter if we proceeded or not: I'd still have to take them in order to trigger tomorrow. No reason to take the latter two shots as I'd made up my mind.

8:30pm came and I made the call. I telephoned our sweetie pie nurse and confided in her that J didn't want to do another IVF cycle after this one and that I didn't feel that we were truly giving it our best shot. I'd been thru the ringer with the cysts, the 2 months of lupron, and now I'd lost a huge percentage of my follicles. I explained that I didn't think that this was an optimal cycle for me and that I felt it was best that we cancel and start again with the next AF. I think I probably told her a bit too much about our reasons for canceling. Hopefully I didn't burden her with undue information.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to apologize to her, and to Dr. Pompy, but I did. I feel that I kind of let them down in a way, but as La Coloratura said, I paid them for each visit, ultrasound, and blood draw. I had a right to do whatever I wanted with this cycle. I fought back tears of disappointment during our conversation. But it's done. We're canceled. I'm kind of shocked we canceled ourselves, but hopefully next month will be better.

It's a hell of a let down after all we just went through.

[Millie if you're reading...I'd love to hear what you think of all of this.]