Thanks to Kel for posting my quick text message… of course after going to all that work to set up posting from my cell phone it was returned as undeliverable. (Talk about adding insult to injury, I’m sitting in the car, thoroughly upset, tapping away at the phone for a good 15 minutes and it won’t send it.)

So yes, the initial phone call was from the doctor herself giving us the news that of my 13 eggs retrieved, only 1 of them was mature. She asked me questions about the HCG injection I took to confirm that I did it correctly (I did). She said it was “very unusual” for this to happen and it sounded to me as if she just didn’t understand it and thought that something went wrong. Den immediately blamed the change in dosage – this cycle they dropped from a starting dose of 150iu of Follistim (in cycle 1) to 125iu this cycle. He was uncomfortable with the change from the start, though I was not. I understood that last time I stimmed quickly and coasted at the end, and this time they wanted to avoid that and the (mild) OHSS I had last time.

Den and I talked it over – well, talked and then sat in silence for a good 10 or 15 minutes, just feeling the weight of failure and disappointment… dealing with the fact that there would be no 5-day transfer, there would be no FETs, there would be no second chances. On the phone the doctor mentioned “next time”. I was too stunned into silence about the whole thing to yell “there won’t BE a next time, you IDIOT!” They really did NOT seem to grip the full reality of our insurance situation – two IVF cycles. That’s it. We will now be facing some very serious financial considerations if we want to do it again.

Then I started wondering about last cycle. I put in a call to the nurses and asked them what my egg maturity rate was last cycle – that at least would tell us if it was something specific to this cycle, something we changed or did wrong this cycle that caused this. I got a call back the next morning with my answer, and the answer made me very, very angry. Last cycle I had 24 eggs retrieved. Of those 24 only 4 were mature, and two of those were “dead”. We had 2 alive, mature eggs, and BOTH of them fertilized without ICSI, and made it to transfer.

Why were we not informed of this last time? Why was this NOT taken into consideration when deciding our protocol for the second cycle? Someone fucked up, that’s the only conclusion I can reach here. They erroniously assumed that a fertilization rate of 2/24 was due to the sperm not penetrating the egg, when in actuality it was because the overwhelming majority of my eggs were immature to start with and never even had a chance. Furthermore, 100% of the available eggs successfully fertilized! If we had done ICSI last cycle it would not have changed the outcome!

So WHY in god’s name did they think ICSI would change our situation this time? In fact, by knowingly reducing the number of eggs available in total they reduced the number of mature eggs as well. Basically, they did exactly the wrong thing. They made our situation WORSE, instead of better. We know nothing more than we did last time, and we really didn’t stand a chance. And this entire cycle failure could have been prevented had they simply looked at the egg maturity rate of last cycle – data which they obviously have on-hand, since the nurse was able to retrieve it for me without a problem.

We feel like we just got cheated out of an entire fucking cycle. Our LAST fucking cycle. It was nearly a complete bust, and it was a preventable situation. Now maybe it could not have been “fixed” – I don’t think they really know what to do. But they could have done SOMETHING. They could have increased my menopur, or stimmed slower, or done more ultrasounds, or triggered differently. Who knows what they could have done, but they could have done something, ANYTHING, aimed to mature my eggs. They did no such thing.

So Den and I are far past feeling upset and disappointed… we are angry – very, very angry. I took two valium when I got to the transfer, which I think helped me just push it all out of my head and chat with the nurses (I don’t blame the nurses, or the U/S tech – well, not really) and try to just meditate and remain calm through the transfer. Den on the other hand sat on his stool with his arms crossed, glowering and not talking to anyone. He told me later that he’s feeling so angry he found it extremely difficult to be civil to anyone. He made a few snappish comments in response to comments made by the nurse – such as, when one of the nurses said something about, “Next time….” Den retorted with, “We won’t have to worry about that for a long, long time.” I don’t blame him. I did wish he could have mellowed out in order to help me mellow out, but instead I just held his hand and focussed on myself. He’s perfectly valid in feeling the way he does.

We did really push for a 5-day transfer. Den and I talked about it and our feeling is that we’d rather have the embryo arrest in a petri dish and end our misery early, rather than transferring it earlier and then living in this horrible state of limbo for nearly 2 weeks, only to have it fail anyways just like last time. I know that this is in large part influenced by last cycle, how we had 2 good embryos and far too much hope, and we were completely crushed when it didn’t work. We don’t want to go through that again. There were parts during Sunday when I didn’t even want to have a transfer. I just wanted to walk away.

And to be fair the nurse and the doctor did discuss it and even talked to the embryologists, but everyone agreed that a 3-day would give us the best chance of pregnancy… that some embryos don’t do well in a petri dish, but would do better in the uterus. I know other IVF labs around the country are doing 5-day transfers no matter how many embryos there are, but our lab uses 5-day to weed some out to hopefully pick out the “best candidate”. Since we only had one candidate, to them there was no benefit to going to 5-day.

We obviously did end up leaving Boston at 8:30am this morning and driving all the way back here to the IVF lab and having our transfer. The good news – the one little bit of good news through all of this clusterfuck – is that our one little embryo developed into a very high-grade 8-cell and they said it is “compacting”, which is the precursor to becoming a blast.

Not that we are holding out a whole lot of good feelings and hope about it. Last time we had one 8-cell high-grade embryo and it flunked the implantation test.

We still need to decide on a name for the embryo. Den suggested “Han [Solo]” but I want something a little more…. meaningful and reflective of the anger and disaster.