The IVF Club

A Personal Blog About IVF Treatment & Infertility

One or Two Embryos

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After surging LH levels for 3 days and ovulation now probably occurring today, I am concerned that the length of time between ovulation and my next cycle will be short and that my body will not have enough time to support the embryo that is planned to be implanted on Friday. 

Maybe I am being paranoid but I don’t want to put my little blastocysts at risk.  We’ve had 10 cycles now (although I am losing count) so any problems could mean yet another cycle to go through.  Even worse, we had planned to have 2 enbryos transferred. Now I am reluctant to have both implanted as my cycle has been really strange this cycle.

For a start, I noticed on day 13 that there was a slight surge in LH levels but not enough to say I was ovulating. Every day after until Saturday, there had been no surge and now I have surged for 3 days.  My basal temperature also tells me that I have not yet ovulation. Whilst it is normal for me to ovulate a little late, the fact that my LH levels have been surging for so long is not normal.

I am putting the interruption to my cycle down to the fact that I had been travelling early last week and severely lacked sleep due to the travel in different timezones and the lack of comfortable bed.

So the question is do I change my consent form from 2 embryos to 1 or do I just skip this month and start again the following month?  We really haven’t had much luck in the baby department so far so I am reluctant to put my little embryos at risk and head back to the baby making factory for yet another round of IVF.

It’s Pointless Charting Your Ovulation Cycle

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Over the last few weeks and at the insistence of my Chinese Herbalist, I have desperately been trying to chart my basal temperature in the hope that I will be able to tell when I am ovulating.  My efforts have been pretty pitiful.  It seems that when I am on holidays my routine just flies out the window.  Instead of getting up at 7am to take my temperature, I’ve been getting up at 8am or 9am or even 10am. Not a great effort when you are supposed to be taking your temperature at the same time every mornings. Even worse, some mornings I have just plain forgotten to do it.

I guess for me it doesn’t matter. I am resigned to the fact that IVF is really my only option of getting pregnant. The anti-bodies in my husbands sperm pretty much guarantee that.  So given I am not undergoing any IVF cycle, it’s pretty hard for me to rationalize that I should be charting. Its also nice actually having a break and not charting a damn thing.

Of course my herbalist sees it differently. She wants to make sure that I am actually ovulating so she can treat what conditions I might have.  Trouble is –  I already know I ovulate – I know that it usually happens a bit later than normal. I am also pretty well versed in detecting when I am about to ovulate . Of course, my herbalist doesn’t see this so she would want to see a chart! Proof!  Personally, I think she is going to have more luck in getting me to do this when I start back at work on Monday. I am also a bit embarrassed by it as I have been so lazy in recording the damn thing.

Even worse every time I see her I forget to bring her my chart so she can see how things are tracking. Somehow I don’t think she is going to appreciate looking at it when there are lots of gaps in it.  I think she might just have to wait until next month for an accurate chart – at least it  will coincide with when I am planning to have a couple of my embryos transferred and I know my motivation levels will be significantly higher. By this time, it will be two months since my last IVF failure.  I am probably a bad client.   I suppose that is the frustration of IVF.  The more you do it, the more blase you become about certain aspects of it.  You treat it seriously but not too seriously as more than likely, another failure could be just around the corner and this is not an easy thing to have to face.

The IVF Waiting Game

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Well I am officially in the 2 week waiting zone but the reality is, when you are doing IVF, every aspect of your life can become a waiting game.  And it’s a game that is not always fun.

The problem with IVF is that all one ever does is WAIT! Your life becomes measured in units of time.

You wait to get your period so you can start IVF.  You wait day after day to ovulate so the frozen embryo can be transferred.  Yout wait until it can be transferred. You wait for your next blood test. You wait for your next ultrasound appointment. You do the two week wait. You wait to get pregnant. You wait before you do the pregnancy test. You wait for the fertility clinic to call you back. You wait for those test results even though most times you already know the answer.

You wait to start the contraceptive pill. You wait to start the nasal spray. You wait to start injections. You wait to do the final injection.  You wait to have sex so the sperm is at it’s peak. You wait for Egg Retrieval. You wait for embryo transfer. You wait to hear news about the rest of your fertilization rates so you know how many you have left on ice. You wait to get your period.

You wait until you are in a better emotional state to tell your friends and family the outcome. You wait for the grief to disappear. You wait until you can get your next appointment. You wait another month before can start again. You wait for it to be your turn to be pregnant. You wait for your weight to return back to normal after all the weight gain from ferility medications. You wait for your skin to return back to normal because the fertility medications have made your nose look like Rudoph the Red nose reindeer. You wait in a job you no longer enjoy just in case you might be pregnant.

I don’t know about you, but I feel I’ve waited long enough! I just want a positive outcome. Four more days til my next blood test.  Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Change in Antagonist IVF Treatment Procedure

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One major change from the treatment protocol I had last time is the fact that instead of injecting the antagonist in the evening an hour after the follicle stimulating hormone, I now need to inject the antagonist in the morning. I asked my new nurse why the treatment protocols had changed. She replied that an expert visited the clinic in April and advised that these cycles tended to have better success when the antagonist was given the next morning.

I was mildly annoyed as I had treatment in July and I had been told to inject in the evening. I asked my nurse about this. The reply, “it takes time to do a proper literature search so it was not adopted as a procedure until June or July this year.”  Of course,  indicated that my treatment was in July so why was I not told of this.  She suggested that maybe the treatment was adopted after I commenced.  Maybe! Maybe!  Wouldn’t you kind of think it might actually be a good thing to know – especially after spending countless dollars on the treatment and having what is starting to become countless failures.

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Tips To Improve Male Infertility

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At a recent human reproduction and embryology conference in Europe (http://www.eshre.com), some interesting findings on Male Factor Infertility were uncovered.

One of the studies titled “Keep the River Flowing” was an exploratory study investigating the effect of daily ejaculation for 7 days and sperm DNA damage. Anyway, the study uncovered that 3 days of abstinence followed by 7 days consecutive days of ejaculation, resulted in reduced sperm DNA fragmentation (down from 33% to 21.8%), increased motility and improved morphology.

It was concluded that sex / ejaculation for 7 days leading up to and including ovulation during a normal female reproductive cycle may then increase chances of conception. The implication being that if the same thing was applied leading up to a sperm collection for IVF/IUI/ICSI then the chances of conception may also be improved. There is the usual caveat that more studies are needed to look at this further but I don’t need any convincing. We’ve tried many things – might as well give this a go and keep the river flowing as well. My poor husband is going to be exhausted (he works full time and studies part-time)!

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