I’m still trying to mentally calculate the crazy odds of this pregnancy. My eggs suck, no one knows why, and while doing IVF I get crappy eggs that aren’t mature enough to use. And even then when we do actually put back a real embryo my implantation rate seems to be between 33-50%. So then I lost one tube to the ectopic so that right there cuts my crappy odds of getting pregnant naturally in half again. Oh, and I’m still breastfeeding, which you’re not supposed to do during IVF because it could lower your chances of success. (No actual data on this one, though, but the hormones in breastfeeding kind of work against the hormones of a normal cycle.)<\/p>\n
I swear the soy did something, though. I know people are wondering, so here’s what it was: I heard friends online talking about soy isoflavones having a similar effect on eggs as clomid. Soy isoflavones is sold in pill form on the shelf as a treatment for menopause. Now I did clomid for a few cycles and got a bunch of eggs but no pregnancy. So I didn’t really have any high hopes for the soy, but I was in a “I’ll try whatever” kind of mind space. I took 150mg\/day, days 5-9. Apparently you can take it days 3-7, but I went with 5-9 in the hopes that it would mature my eggs more instead of making more of them.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately from the time I started taking the pills all the way through my cycle I felt HORRIBLE. I was bloated, my ovaries hurt, I was bitchy as HELL. I was not a happy person. My ovulation was no earlier or different (except I certainly felt it!). And then? I got my period. I didn’t quite throw the pills in the trash, but I definitely did say, “Fuck this, I’m not feeling that shitty every month until we do IVF!”<\/p>\n
So in August – this last cycle – I didn’t take anything at all. I was still feeling kind of gross from the soy, and still grouchy about it too. I tried not to pay attention to my cycle, but by week 3 I realized I was still getting fertile signals from my body and no ovulation signals. My estrogen was definitely up, but no egg. For the first time in a long time I actually cannot pinpoint when I ovulated, but I know it happened around the end of August (around cycle day 23) because come September my body went back to normal no-longer-fertile.<\/p>\n
In the second week after ovulating I started feeling slightly nauseated every day, which made me wonder, and it was cycle day 34 when I took the first pregnancy test (the one that I thought was an evap).<\/p>\n
It seems bizarre to me that taking soy the prior<\/i> cycle would have gotten me pregnant, but it’s very clear that I had estrogen running amok this month with a good two week fertile period and delayed ovulation. Looking back at my IVF cycles that at least does make sense, as the cycles when I stimmed slowly were the ones where I had better egg maturity. They just need more time to soak, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m still trying to mentally calculate the crazy odds of this pregnancy. My eggs suck, no one knows why, and while doing IVF I get crappy eggs that aren’t mature enough to use. And even then when we do actually put back a real embryo my implantation rate seems to be between 33-50%. So then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3803,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802\/revisions\/3803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}