Today I had the follow up with my doctor. I was a little late getting there, but I wasn’t too concerned because they’re usually running behind anyways. I was called back by the doctor himself and the resident who has been shadowing him for the past month.

The Dr asked how I was, and when we at in an exam room he shook his head a little and said he was very sorry for what had happened, and then said, “You just have terrible reproductive luck.” I laughed at that. Yes… I certainly do.

Then he started talking about my stims cycles and how we’ve done some unusual stims with me. He mentioned the paper he’d read that suggested using straight Menopur as a means to increase the results for people like me whose eggs don’t mature properly, he said it actually wasn’t a published paper, but he had been reviewing it… and that’s what led to the success of my last stims (“success” being 6 embryos rather than 1 or 2). He said he’d actually seen the doctor who wrote the paper at a conference this past weekend and thanked him. How cool is that.

So then he said that I have one embryo still in storage and there is no reason this ectopic should hold that up at all, that I can start whenever I want to… with this coming AF if that’s what I want (yes please!!). He’ll let the nurses know so everything will be ready! I am THRILLED!

He also said, of course, that if the frozen transfer doesn’t work, or if the embryo doesn’t survive the thaw, then we’ll just do another stims cycle. I mean, it IS easier now that I know we have a protocol that works – and he mentioned something about “taking it to the next level,” I’m not sure if that means he wants to improve on the protocol, or if he just meant actually getting and keeping me pregnant. But man, the idea of going through stims again makes my stomach a little upset. I just keep thinking about the crap I’ve gone through in stims… the overstimming, the very poor egg maturity… I used to go through stims with excitement. Now all I feel is dread at more bad news. And that sucks. But hopefully we won’t have to do more stims for a long time.

After that the Resident took out one little stitch that was poking out from my right side incision while the Doctor rambled a bit about ectopics and risk factors (I don’t have any, except now I have the risk factor of “previous ectopic”) and how they removed my affected tube so as to not increase my risks any further. I was kind of more focussed on the person tugging at my incision and missed a lot of what he said, unfortunately. But I got the general idea.

And then off I went, with a smile on my face at the prospect of next month’s FET. I am so relieved, so happy that I won’t be delayed any further.

The doctor said I am brave. That caught me off-guard. It’s not something you really expect a doctor to say. I don’t feel brave. I’m doing what I have to do to get to the other side, that is all. And I am just glad that the people like my doctor are willing to help me get there.

::

I’ve been thinking about my doctor’s comments about bad reproductive luck. Let me recap:

I am infertile. I have to do IVF. That part isn’t all that uncommon, unfortunately. But when I do IVF, my results SUCK compared to pretty much everyone else’s. I have low oocyte/egg maturity. I have now idea how rare it is, but it appears to be pretty damn rare, considering the only information I can find on it are in some medical journal articles. I can’t even find it on google. My clinic, which does a lot of IVF cycles, was supremely caught off-guard and didn’t know what to do about it.

I had a stillbirth, which by itself happens in roughly 1 out of every 150 births. Bad luck, but not exactly “rare”… until you look at the cause of the stillbirth. Cord wrapped around? Chromosomal problems? Nah, nothing so mundane. Oh no, the chorion ruptured, causing strips of tissue… one of which just happened to wrap tightly around his umbilical cord. I previously found an article that cited the odds of amniotic bands fatally affecting the umbilical cord to be about one in 100,000 births. That’s… pretty fucking rare. WTF?

And finally we have an ectopic tubal pregnancy after an IVF transfer that specifically placed the embryo in my uterus. Not entirely rare, some quick searches have shown the incidence to be 1-3% of IVF pregnancies. (I take comfort in the fact that at least this is somewhat “normal” and no doctors were struggling to understand what the hell happened.)

So how in the hell does one person get the rare infertility problem, the crazy-rare stillbirth, and an ectopic pregnancy after IVF… three random, completely unrelated events. I guess I really am one in a million.

I’ve never wanted to be more normal in my life.