Follow-up with the RE

Will and I finally met last week with the RE to talk about the failure of IVF #5. It was a good meeting but punctuated with sentences from the RE that began with information about stats or various procedures and protocols, and then would end, "but I know you already know all about that."

I guess we've been around the bend with this IVF business enough times that there's not a whole lot of new ground to cover. Still, it was good to meet. The RE seems to think this latest attempt to trigger early was not worth it given the small number of eggs we retrieved (um, I agree). He still maintains that there should be a normal egg in my ovaries somewhere, but he's starting to sound less sure of this. And he doesn't have any better answers than we do on why - 37 embryos into this - we haven't stumbled on a golden egg or two yet.

Despite all of our failures during multiple cycles, our ever-optimistic RE still doesn't think we're at the place of donor egg yet, although I think all three of us are feeling that we're getting close to the end of the line.

So...he outlined a few options:

1. Do another straight IVF cycle - this time he's thinking maybe an estrogen priming protocol.

2. Do PGD "just to see what's actually going on in those embryos." He sounded more encouraging of this than in the past. Although he still thinks it will lower our chances, he thought it might be worth a try just to get a better diagnostic picture.

3. Try to do a blast transfer rather than the "transfer as many as possible" strategy we've been using.

4. Go ahead and use our frozen embryos. (We've been holding off on this - after all, time is ovary. We have six day 1 embryos frozen from cycle number 2, with no idea of quality - of course, examining how all the other embryos have turned out, we can guess, and it doesn't look good).

Given these four choices, what did we decide on?

We told him we were thinking we'd choose option 5.

Which is, to go out to Colorado and give it a try there this summer.

Our RE was supportive of this move (when I'm being cynical, I think he'd like us to go elsewhere so we can go ruin some other poor clinic's stats!) He understands that we're drawn to Colorado's microarray and CGH technology to get a read on the embryos. And that we're just curious to mix things up by trying something different. And he understands that I have some rare time off which would make an out of town cycle possible. He also said, God bless him, that he would be happy to do my monitoring for that cycle before I fly out there, which I greatly appreciate.

There you have it. The summary of WTF #5.

One-day work-up scheduled in Colorado for July 7. Tentative plans to cycle there in August.

Here's to moving forward.

Mo