I just snow this is the donor for us!

Greetings from a very snowy England!

This weekend has seen a huge amount of the white stuff land on our door step. Now this usually grinds the whole country to a stop but I have to give credit where it’s due – I think for once we were actually prepared for the snow. The roads have remained clear and life as we know it seems to be carrying on pretty much as normal. This isn’t all good news however – it means that there will be no ‘snow day’ for me tomorrow and I will have to drag myself to work! Grrr!

 

Seeing as it’s been 4 months since my husbands big op and his health is so much better, we thought it might be worth him having another sperm test to see if things have improved in that department. As it happens, it wasn’t meant to be. The results are in and there are still zero sperm in his sample.   I guess we were clutching at straws to think that he could go from nothing being found in an SSR to something being there now in an ordinary sample but it is still really disappointing. What did make me smile a little though was that my husband actually said that if there had been anything found he would have been slightly reluctant to go further with another SSR to try to get enough sperm to use for ICSI because it would have been so expensive. I know it may sound strange that him saying this made me smile but it’s actually the fact that he’s made peace with the fact that we need a donor that makes me happy.

Talking of donors, after we had our ‘commiserations appointment’ last month to discuss the failure of our last cycle, one of the things we discussed was changing our donor. The one we have used for the last 2 cycles requires ICSI which adds just over £1000 to the cost of the cycle. I always thought it was a bit odd using a donor that needed ICSI as surely this means that the sperm is not quite top-notch. The consultant agreed and said we should try a new one. Interestingly, when I called the unit to find out our options on other donors, the nurse I spoke to was adamant that our previous donor was fine and sounded irritated that the consultant had suggested it would be best to have one that doesn’t require ICSI! Anyway, she told me the options of the others available and there was only one that sounded ok. Here are the details of our new donor:

• Fair / medium skin
• Mid brown hair
• Green eyes
• 6ft tall
• 11 stone
• Career: Garden design / artistic
• Interests / hobbies: Sports, fishing
• Married

So, we now have this donor assigned to us and at least that means we are going to save a little bit of money on our next cycle. I just hope that our new donor brings us the result that we so desperately crave!

Minus one colon!

It’s been such a long time since I’ve posted anything. As usual, life has been getting in the way of my blogging and boy has it been a busy life since I last posted!

The most important thing that has happened is that my dear husband has been through major (and hopefully life altering) surgery. Over the summer, we enjoyed a relaxing 2 weeks in Spain and as soon as we returned back to Blighty, he was whisked into hospital to have a pan proctocolectomy. He also had his ileostomy re-sited and made permanent. Two amazing surgeons worked their magic – one to do the colorectal stuff and the other to do the plastic surgery to keep my husband’s bottom looking lovely. And a fine job they did too. He is now almost 6 weeks post op and doing amazingly well. The have been a couple of hiccups along the road to recovery, one being a lingering infection which is still draining itself now but is making progress everyday. In terms of my husbands crohns – he feels free of it… finally! The doctors are now actually saying that his blood results are showing that he may not have had crohns all along. It would appear that he has indeterminate colitis/crohns and they’re hoping that this op may well cure him forever. Whilst this would obviously be a dream come true it is difficult to believe at the moment. For now we just take things one day at a time and are enjoying the fact that he feels so much better than he has done in the last 3 years.

The other big development that is happening with us at the moment is that we are currently in the first phase of our second round of IVF (ICSI). I have been injecting the down regulating drug, Buserelin, since Saturday 15th Sept. I have one more week to go until my DR scan to see if I can start stimming. My husband says he’s feeling positive about this cycle, I have mixed feelings.

I plan to keep my blog up to date as I continue through this IVF cycle. So watch this space… and fingers crossed it has a happier ending than our first cycle!

Fast track to the 2ww

Once again, I’ve been a rubbish blogger. Rubbish in the sense that I simply haven’t blogged!

I seem to have got swept away with the trials and tribulations that IVF brings and become slightly hooked on infertility forums for support through this process. But I’m back with a promise to buck my ideas up and blog away to my heart’s content!

So, where are we now? Here’s a little time-line of events to help catch up:

Wed 16th May – Started injecting 150 Menopur every evening and reduced my Buserelin to 0.25 each morning.

Fri 25th May - Day 10 stims scan. Follicles in both ovaries, although not a huge amount at decent sizes. Menopur upped to 187.5

Mon 28th May – Day 13 stims scan. Growth seen but still told to only expect 4 or 5 follicles to be at the right size for giving mature eggs. Side effects wise, I’ve been really lucky. I haven’t really had any apart from some slight bloating towards the end of stimming.

Wed 30th May – Day 15 stims scan. Similar growth rate to before and expectation for maybe 5 eggs. Egg collection booked in for Friday. Told to do one more night of stims and the trigger shot of Ovitrelle at 2am Thurs morning! It turned out that I didn’t have enough Menopur to do another injection so the clinic told me not to bother – this stressed me out as surely there was a reason for wanting me to do an extra dose! Panicking now that it will affect the number of eggs we get.

Fri 1st June – Egg collection at 1pm. The sedation was amazing and I was out like a light. When I came round we were told they had got 11 eggs! Amazing! Now was the wait to see how many were mature and got jiggy in the lab that night. They were going to be injected (ICSI) as the donor sperm required this after thawing. Later that afternoon, the pain from the procedure really kicked in and the drugs I’d been given made me really sick. Fortunately it passed after a few hours and I was able to relax for the rest of the evening.

Sat 2nd June – We are told that 9 out of the 11 eggs had fertilized and that they would be going for either a 3 or 5 day transfer, depending on how they develop. Wow! We’re feeling really pleased with how it’s gone so far.

Mon 4th June – The clinic called to say that 8 embryos are still developing well (1 doesn’t quite meet criteria) so we will be having a 5 day transfer on Wednesday.

Wed 6th June – 10am is our embryo transfer. We had to wait a while before being seen and I had been told to go with a full bladder so by the time we got in the room, I was about to burst! The embryologist came to speak to us and said that there were 2 embryos that had made it to blastocyst stage but they were reduced quality (she gave them a CC grading). She suggested we have both transferred to give us a better chance of one of them sticking. We knew that this meant our chances of success were low as they would normally be very against someone of my age having more than one put back. She then went on to say that there are only 4 other embryos remaining but they were not yet at blastocyst stage and they would leave them overnight to see if they continued to develop but for us to be prepared that we might not have any to freeze.  So the transfer went ahead. I desperately stared at the monitor to see if I could see our precious little embryos enter my uterus but I didn’t see a thing. My husband said he saw a flash of fluid so at least one of us did. We are given a pregnancy test, instructions for the next few days and an official test date of Sunday 17th June (Father’s Day ironically!) We go home feeling very deflated. I struggle to stay positive and try to prepare myself for this treatment cycle to end with a negative result.

Thurs 7th June – The clinic called to say our other 4 embryos did make it to blasts in the end but were not good enough quality to freeze.

And so, here we are. I am now in what is called the 2 week wait (2ww). Although for us it is actually 11 days. This, however, doesn’t make it any less torturous. I have googled every possible thing related to the success or failure of “reduced quality” blasts and it would appear that we may have a chance this could work for us but it is slim. I am trying so very hard to stay positive and my husband is trying to be realistic – I think he’s dreading how I will react if we get a negative on Sunday. Only time will tell, I guess.

For now, we wait. And hope.

The story so far…

Ok so where do I start? The beginning I guess.

My husband and I have been trying to get pregnant for a year and a half now. We always thought that it might not be easy as my husband has some health issues and has been through a particularly rough time of it recently. So after a year of trying, with no baby in sight, we took ourselves off to our GP to find out what the problem was. All the usual tests, hospital referrals etc ensued and to cut a long story short, our initial worries were confirmed - we are unable to fall pregnant naturally due to my husband’s health and medication. So we will be taking the route of IVF (most probably with ICSI) to start our family.

That pretty much takes us up to where we are now. We haven’t actually started the IVF yet – we have our consent consultation early Feb and that should kick the whole thing off. I’ll be keeping a regular diary now of our journey. Sharing the highs and the lows (hopefully we won’t have too many of the latter) and our feelings as we go through the ivf process.

Wish us luck!