Hi ladies
Hello all and welcome newbies
This is a long one, so strap in! Apols for such a long post, but quite a lot has gone on over the last week.
I saw my consultant last Monday for the results of my Day 3 bloods, and they were pretty much catastrophic.
When I’d last had bloods done, at the age of 28, my FSH was great (low), my AMH was good (high), my ovaries were polycystic but my antral follicle count was good and I had a cracking ovarian reserve. PCOS presents fertility issues, but it's usually very easily dealable-withable.
Dial forward 5 years, and my blood tests last week indicated at 33 I had the ovaries of a premenopausal women in her late 40s. FSH ridiculously high (v bad), AMH practically non existent (very very bad). So bad that most clinics wouldn’t accept someone with those scores as the chances of getting any eggs out for IVF would be tiny. Seemingly crashing towards premature ovarian failure.
FUCK.
However the scan showed a different picture. There was some activity going on in my ovaries, incl a dominant follicle, suggesting I was gearing up to ovulate this month. Whereas the blood tests suggested we’d see ovaries that were completely asleep.
In the consultant’s words ‘something doesn’t stack up’, as the tests are saying two completely different things, and all my meds over recent years might have sent my hormones haywire. So he starts me on low dose Clomid (50mg, 5 day course) to see if it has any effect at all on my ovaries, and to come back in a week.
The last week has been so so hard, as it was a lot to deal with. I’d gone from being polycystic with a good ovarian reserve at 28, to seemingly pre menopausal at 33.
I was coming to terms with the very real possibility I might never be able to conceive, and seriously thinking about the possibility of donor eggs. And very, very, very sad.
However.
Given the bloods, it looked like we’d need the sledgehammer approach to get any response, and the gentle nudge of low dose Clomid was likely to do bugger all.
Except it didn’t. I took it Mon-Fri last week, and today the scan showed a nice ripe juicy 22mm follicle, and 2 other smaller ones that the Clomid had kicked into gear.
Fuck. Me.
Consultant said he absolutely didn’t expect to see this at ALL. He was flabbergasted looking at the ultrasound screen. It is v v v good news.
Holy crap, my ovaries responded to low dose Clomid. WTF?!
My lining was very thin, so even if we do manage to catch this egg, the chances of implantation this month are slim. And giving me medication to thicken the lining would throw everything else out, and he doesn’t want to bugger around with my messed up hormones even more.
That said, I’m going for a trigger shot tomorrow, and should ovulate 36h later. If DH can get back to London by tomorrow evening, we’ve been told to DTD Thu and Fri to see if we can catch the egg. Not expecting anything, but we’ll give it a go just in case!
Hopefully if I ovulate, that’ll mean I have an actual cycle, and even if I don’t get a proper period because the lining is so thin, my cycle will be reset so we can redo the Day 3 bloods.
And more to the point, given I’ve miraculously responded to 50mg Clomid, then there is a v v v good chance that I should respond well to much stronger FSH stimulation for IVF. And that if the lining is looking too thin, we can freeze any embryos we get, give me medication to thicken up the lining and do a FET the next month so there’s hopefully a nice comfy lining to give the best chance of implantation.
Continuing with Clomid isn’t going to do much to get me pregnant if it makes me ovulate but thins my lining. Injectables won’t thin my lining, but the risk of multiples with injectables + DTD is too great, so injectables + IVF gives us a much better chance of a healthy pregnancy.
And whereas last week it was ‘there’s a slim chance of IVF working but it’s very slim’, it’s now ‘OK things are looking much much better, let’s go full steam ahead and try and get me pregnant’.
My consultant trained under Professor Robert Winston and is the lead clinician for reproductive medicine at Barts Hospital, so he knows his stuff. He said the bloods had him completely stumped and (his words) ‘I’m not usually stumped’.
So Christ knows what kind of medical marvel I am.
However what’s going on with my ovaries is what matters right now, not what the bloods say. And that’s a hell of a lot more positive than the bloods would suggest.
Head still spinning, but now in a good way.
We have a plan. And things are looking significantly more positive than they were.
PHEW.
Sorry for epic post, but it’s been a long old week.
Trigger shot tomorrow, hopefully AF in 2 weeks time, redo bloods, see consultant first week in September, start IVF, keep fingers crossed.
And breathe.