Crash and BurnWith Added Paranormal Kids Flava?

Retrieval was today.

4 follicles. 1 immature follicle retrieved.

I have nothing. NOTHING! Nothing to fertilize.

How can this be? I had a 18mm follicle two days ago. There is nothing about that follicle that could remotely be considered "immature".

How could this cycle have gone so wrong? I just don't understand it. The only things that were different were that I took resveratrol/pycnogenol and I took my HCG trigger in the arm (rather than the hip).

That the largest follicle wasn't mature (and three didn't detach from the follicle wall) tells me that there must have been something wrong with the HCG trigger. What else could it be?

Anyone know what sorts of things cause follicles to just not mature?

I'm having a very hard time emotionally with this failure. The last one was bad...but to have nothing is just heartbreaking. At least with my first failures, I had my ex to lean on. A shoulder to cry on.

This time 'round, I'm on my own, despite that I have an uninvolved partner who doesn't want further children beyond the three he already has. Hence, the DS. He's being terribly detached, hasn't checked in on me once to see if I am OK physically or emotionally. Not once. He didn't even ask how it went when he picked me up from the clinic. I'm stunned. Shocked. Hurt.

I can't express how utterly alone I feel right now. I'm going to become dehydrated if I don't stop crying soon.

On the bright side (AS IF there could be one today), the sclerotherapy on my ovaries was a successful procedure. So the anesthesia went to a good use. Dr. Italian removed 3 endometriomas on my right ovary and 1 on my left. He said that the one on my left gave him a bit of trouble and that he had to "break it up" to get it out. Ick, ick, ick. I don't even want to know what that truly means in terms of process.

I've been put on best rest for the rest of the day as my empty endometriomas were pumped full of a tetracycline solution and they'll slowly absorb over the next few days. I'm not to be "jostled" by the kids...so no jumping on me, crashing into me, etc. No small feat for these guys to be THAT well behaved. Seriously.

Dr. Italian wrote me a Rx for DepoProvera tablets that I'll take orally for 14 days then my period will start like clockwork the day after Christmas or the day after that. When that happens we'll do a follicle check on CD3, E2 test, and we'll see if things look good enough to start cycle #6.

I asked him about doing an "agonist antagonist conversion protocol" next cycle and he said that we could do it. I'd need to get a progesterone test on CD21 and if it was high enough I'd start lupron.

Scary thing is that I will probably be in Zurich, Switzerland at that time...so how the hell I'll get a progesterone test done remotely, and in a foreign country, is utterly beyond me. I'm sure I can get a test done, it's just that hopefully the test results are in English and in units that Dr. Italian can convert from.

But back to today...and what happened after we left the clinic.

After he picked me up from the clinic we drove back home across the river and headed out for brunch. My treat since he had to sit in wretched traffic in the tunnel to get to me. I explained to the kids the rule about not crashing into me. Out of the blue, the older kid said aloud, "She had an operation and she's never going to have a baby. She can't have any children EVER!!!" (Paraphrasing). He kept going on and on about how I would never have children. Mind you, he's 5. I'd have backslaped him if he was a teenager. I turned to his father, holding back tears as best I could, and asked, "Did you guys have a conversation about this before you came to get me or what?" and he said "NO!". Talk about hitting me with the lowest blow I could have ever had. Ouch. And where the hell did he get such an idea? They have no idea I am trying to get pregnant whatsoever. It's just not talked about at all when they are around. Their dad finally told the older boy to "shut up", sensing that it had me on the verge of total freakout. What the hell got into him, I have no idea.

Even weirder. The little one (also a boy), who is four and I am completely bonded to, wants to be a girl when he "grows up" (because, in his words, "girls are nice"). He has this alter ego named "Sophie" that he likes to assume. He'll put my curtain drawback cords on his head, for hair, (they're silky rope with long silky tassels) and then morph into Sophie. What's sorta strange is that Sophie is the name I'd give to my daughter if I ever had one (actually Sophia, but Sophie for short). I was almost named Sophie by my mother so it has a soft spot in my heart. I told him one day, "If I ever had a little girl, I'd name her Sophie, too!" Then, just last night, at dinner, he turned to me, out of the blue, and said very matter of factly, "Maybe you'll get to be Sophie's mother."

Eerie.

What's with these kids?

Back to my box of kleenex. :-(

Stim Day 7Cycle Going Bad

Today was my first monitoring U/S with Dr. Italian. The results were dismal.

One large 18mm follicle on the left side, two or three smaller (12mm, 9mm, etc). And NOTHING on the right side save for a few endometriomas.

It's bad. Real bad. It's my fucking age and it's also the endometriomas. But it might also be that I'm on 600iu of Gonal-F which is more than I've ever been on so I might be overstimmed. I get my E2 & prolactin results tomorrow. If we're over 3000 on the E2 then we KNOW that I'm overstimmed. Prolactin was at 14 before I started stims. It'll be interesting to see where it is now. I've got an old bottle of bromocriptine in the armoire that I can pull out if necessary.

So he said that I don't really have time to be choosy about cycles at my age (45) and that we should proceed with the cycle. I agree. If it weren't for the fact that I'm doing a sclerotherapy on my ovary during this retrieval, I'd cancel this cycle and try again in January. But doing the sclerotherapy means that I wouldn't have there wouldn't be enough time for my ovaries to heal between now and the January cohort anyways. I'd be looking at a February cycle date. So it's February for the next cycle no matter how we slice it. No pun intended.

So I'm reluctantly moving forward.

I don't expect a damned thing to be retrieved at this rate but what else can I do at this point?

Next time I'll reduce Gonal-F to 450iu on my own as I know that in my case, "less is more". I hate having to self-medicate but it really pisses me off when our RE's don't listen to us. After 5 actual IVF cycles, and many "tries" (ie, cancelled cycles) I KNOW better than any doctor how I am going to respond to the meds. I'll also be asking for hGH.

Last cycle I lost ALL of the follicles on my right ovary when I started taking the ganirelex. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens again and I lose them all this time.

All I know is that I want to pour myself a huge glass of red wine tonight and chalk it up to a failed cycle. It makes me so sad that a few years ago I was churning out 10 and 15 follicles/eggs a cycle.

Now THIS?

Fuck!!!!!

Stim Day 5Feeling the Pain

Today's stim day 5 and my ovaries are aching and feeling laden. I'm still not convinced that 600iu of gonal-f a day is going to have me ready to trigger when I go in for my first monitoring u/s on Monday afternoon. I told the doc that 600iu was a lot for me and he didn't seem concerned at all. He ordered me 5 syringes of 250mg ganirelex, which I'm supposed to take at some point to keep from ovulating, but I suspect that I'll get in one shot on Monday evening and MAYBE, just MAYBE, a second shot on Tuesday.

My money is on my being ready to trigger on Monday and retrieving on Wednesday.

We're proceeding with the sclerotherapy on the endometriomas on my right ovary immediately after retrieval. They'll be taking two 250mg sterile vials of pure powdered tetracycline and rehydrating them with sterile saline (or other) ... they'll drain the blood from my endometriomas, refill with tetracycline solution, and then redrain near completely. Hopefully they'll heal while I'm in my 2ww and the two weeks following that.

I'm feeling terribly bloated and tender and I'm already looking forward to retrieval. It's hard doing two IVFs in rapid succession. I didn't get a chance to lose the weight from the last cycle and I'm just so incredibly uncomfortable. Also making me feel a bit icky is that yesterday I did an intralipid infusion at my hematologist's office which pumped 200ml of intralipids and 500ml of saline into me. Hmmm...no wonder I'm feeling a bit, plump?

CD6Day After Surgery: Ranting About The East Coast

The doc wasn't able to do the sclerotherapy procedure on my right ovary as they weren't able to get the medication that they use in time. Apparently, the compounding pharmacy in St. Louis that packages the medication that I needed failed to renew their NY state licensing in time and so they're out of commission for another week to week and a half. Ugh.

All it is is pure tetracycline in a sterile vial - my doc would reconstitute it with sterile saline and use this to flush out my ovary once the blood had been aspirated away.

Amazing that there seems to only be ONE pharmacy in the entire blessed country that can do this. Ya know? I bet there are other pharmacies that can do this. Really. It's got to be an east coast madness thing. More on this later.

So they weren't able to do this procedure.

Upon waking up, the doctor said that they also didn't aspirate the cyst on my left ovary as it had already popped.

So, the last RE clinic (Columbia) had essentially postponed my cycle for NOTHING. NOTHING! I could have easily cycled right away. Damn!!! I have loved the doctors there and they have a top notch embryology lab, but it's just frustrating that they have a cookie cutter approach to IVF. Even my cycle was cookie cutter, using ganirelex on me when I am nearly 45. Ugh.

So he did the hysteroscopy, the only thing he COULD do considering the circumstances. He found some flimsy sorts of adhesions in my uterus, which he removed. I had some good cramping afterward and have bee spotting since then.

Bummer that I have to do another procedure the week of November 9th because of the pharmacy. That just bites.

So I am going to be doing cycle #5 in December unless I am able to get them to cycle me out of the December cohort. I am going to beg for that. Hopefully they'll relent and let me proceed earlier, but they do close for holidays so they wouldn't be able to monitor me during Thanksgiving as no one would be there. Maybe I could at least start my stims then and monitor right after the holiday?

We'll see.

It's so hard to be patient when I have so many damned setbacks like this.

Along the surrogate route, I placed an online ad for a gestational surrogate. Three gals have written so far. Wow. I'm a bit scared to go this route, but I am seriously considering this if I wind up getting the job that I am currently interviewing for. I can't afford a surrogate without a job that pays really well as it'll cost me at least $18K for her fees and, at most, another $6K for the attorney's fees to draw up a contract. Add in her travel fees and any other expenses and it's easy to imagine that a surrogate would cost me $30K. At least.

I would love to find a local surrogate to cut down on fees but also that I would simply want to be close by while she is pregnant - but chances of that are slim as you can't pay a surrogate in the state of New York. It's illegal here. Can you f*cking believe that? I simply don't understand why it's illegal for me to literally "rent" a woman's uterus in order to have a child. Also, why shouldn't she be able to provide this service for others? It's her body for cryin' out loud. Some women love to be pregnant and are thrilled to provide this service for others. It's their right to be able to do this! I don't understand our country's laws. We're so behind. We're in such a dark age when it comes to how we deal with fertility, the LGBT community, etc.

It's not illegal in the state of NY to have a compassionate surrogate (unpaid) so I have a few family members that I will ask to see if they might help. I am not hugely close to either side of my family, so asking one of them to help is very uncomfortable for me. Also, because I have immune issues that might be hereditary in nature, a family member might also have the same issues that would cause her to have repeated implantation failure as well.

Why can't the law realize that there are very good reasons for our need for paid gestational surrogates? We need access to women who are willing to do this for us who have had children of their own, or have been surrogates before - women with a proven ability to bear children. At least California doesn't have such silly laws. Paid surrogates are fine. Having the intended parents' names on the birth certificate is fine too. Sheesh.

I am so frustrated with all things east coast today. No offense to anyone who reads this on the east coast. But even the act of buying a bottle of wine in this blessed state (NJ) means that I have to hit up a "liquor store" in addition to a grocery store when I am out shopping. Same for NY, CT, and other surrounding states. The east coast is so puritanical. Anti anything that is outside of the box. State lobbyists say that allowing liquor sales inside stores will cause mom and pop stores, and wineries(!), to go out of business. Really? I don't think so. Opening up your market to new customers would increase sales. Multi level marketing. It's marketing 101 folks.

I've stopped being mad about this one - well almost. I just order my wine from California now and have it shipped here to NJ. Screw this stupid state and the horse it road in on. My dollars are going back to California where it is SANE.