SO WHERE TO FROM HERE?

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again,
this time more wisely"

We had a week to get used to the outcome before we went back to our FS for the follow up appointment. My FS was absolutely wonderful and really took the time to help us understand what had gone wrong and where we could improve. As he had mentioned at our scan, I am just plain over sensitive to the drugs. You always hear about couples who under respond but we had no idea that over responding could be just as challenging and complicated to deal with. My eggs grow too quickly and like anything, if it grows too fast and there are too many the quality isn't going to be very good. My follicles were growing at double the speed of a normal responder.  A close friend of mine once explained it like this: 'When there are too many follies they fight which ones get all the nourishment and it doesn't allow the good ones to get enough so that they can be of the best quality. Amongst all those follies there are only a few that will be great, hence the crap ones stuff it up for all the others. If you had a bunch of naughty kids and one good kid in a room eventually the good kid will end up learning to be naughty too.' I thought that explanation was spot on! What the embryologist didn't tell us was that we had alot of fragmentation (see explanation at the bottom of this post) in our embryos and even the blastocyst that was put back wasn't perfect. We had been told initially we had about a 75% chance of success given the quality of the blasty and our age but our FS said he would have only given it a 35% chance. This made me feel a hell of alot better as crazy as that sounds - a 75% chance and failure made me think that it was me, that my body had rejected our embie and that I had potentially done something wrong that had affected the outcome. A 35% chance made me believe that that little one just wasn't meant to create life. The good news is that we have nothing wrong with the two of us - plenty of eggs, great sperm and fantastic fertilisation results. Our issue is the drugs protocol. No one knew that I would respond the way I did and so there was no way of knowing the way things were going to turn out until it was done and dusted. Next time we will be on an even lower dose and hopefully we will have less but better quality eggs to work with. And hopefully one of them will be our baby.

And so we start again in September 2010 for our last publicly funded cycle. I am relieved to have this break as I really felt that my body needed a break after two back to back cycles of drugs and procedures. Not only that, I also needed the time to be emotionally ready to go through this again. I don't think you can underestimate just how difficult this path can be but I don't doubt for one second it isn't worth it in the end.

Fragmentation: Embryo fragmentation occurs when cells divide unevenly, creating bits of membrane-bound cytoplasm that have no nucleus. The majority of embryos created during IVF cycles are observed to have some fragmentation, however, the more fragmentation, the less likely an embryo is to develop normally and implant successfully. The extent of fragmentation is an important indicator of embryo quality. Some research has also shown that the size of fragments also has an effect on embryo viability.