I really want to go back to the RE.

But it’s not why you think. I’m actually perfectly fine with waiting out these natural cycles, and with our insurance deficiency we couldn’t start IVF right now anyways – which is why I’ve been putting off making an appointment. It seems silly to go if you can’t or won’t do anything, right?

Yeah, well, I find myself getting exceedingly frustrated because I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m sure everyone who has dealt with an “unexplained infertility” diagnosis can understand that one. Not knowing is torture. But with us… when we did our second IVF cycle, with ICSI, we got some light shining on it. “Finally!” I said. “At least we know what’s wrong!”

Thing is, I’m extremely unclear as to what the issue is. I google “low ferilization” and “immature eggs” and many other terms and I still can’t seem to find any similar cases or explanations as to what the hell happened. When I’m talking about our IVF experience people say, “So it was your egg quality then?” And I don’t know what to say. Maybe? But every time I look up poor egg quality I get articles that involve high FSH levels and a high FSH:LH ratio. I didn’t have that. My FSH levels were a little on the higher side, but firmly within the “good” ranking. And my ratio was very close to 1:1. Neither of which indicate any kind of egg quality problem.

Low fertilization… well that just gets me a bunch of articles about how great ICSI is. And one article mentioning how if the ICSI fertilization rate is poor then it suggests an egg quality problem. But then it defines poor ICSI fertilization as the number of fertilized eggs out of the number that were injected. Well, we had one injected, one fertilized.

That would lead me to conclude that the conclusion that the first IVF was also mis-labeled. 24 eggs, 2 fertilized – they said poor fertilization. But only 4 eggs were mature, 2 of which were “dead”! Only 2 would have been ICSI’d. So doesn’t that lead to the same conclusion? NOT a fertilization problem?

Which brings me round to poor egg stimulation, poor egg maturity. Different than egg QUALITY by far. That suggests that it was the stimulation protocol used during IVF that caused the poor “fertilization rate”s and all that crap. But the flip side of that is this one little niggling problem: that doesn’t explain why we’re infertile!!! ALL that explains is why the IVF didn’t go well. It was a medication problem, a protocol problem NOT an inherent problem that happened during my un-medicated cycles. So what, does this mean I’m still unexplained? Just bad luck?

So yeah, I want to go sit down with one of the REs, just to say, “Okay, please explain to me what the fuck happened, why it happened, and what we can do to fix it.” I’m probably going to make an appointment soon. I’ll probably wait until after AF shows to make it, though. I do this every month. Maybe I should just make it now. Lady Luck likes irony.

::

Pee sticks? Still pretty dark. I’m getting pissed at them. It showed a surge, then won’t go back down. I thought it was, yesterday… then today it’s still dark. I started fretting, did I even ovulate? I felt “ovulation” pains, but like others have said, it could – and probably was – my ovaries gearing up to ovulate, not actually doing it. And I’ve had aching since… that could mean either that I ovulated, or that it’s still dicking around in there. I started thinking damnit, maybe I should chart just to figure out what the hell my body is doing and to confirm that it’s actually ovulating.

Then I realized, check my CM. Duh. No fertile CM at all, cervix is high (it was very low). Is it a smoking gun? No. No guarantee. But it’s enough to make me stop fretting, and that’s good enough for me.