Hi ladies
lolly big hugs - it is really emotionally hard, this whole process is totally shit! Retail therapy all the way I say
Great news about your appointment. Short protocol is much easier going on your body than down regging I think. And great news about the antibiotics
We didn’t use glue because Dr said there was no evidence it actually worked, and it sometimes created issues where the embryos could get stuck inside the catheter and need flushing through
Re: the one vs two, I’ll post some stats that my clinic and the HFEA have about success rates of one vs two. Worth also looking at the oneatatime website I linked to before - lots of data there
It all comes down to whether you’re prepared to accept the risks of twins or not
I know too many sad stories about friends with twin pregnancies, so I have a skewed view - so important to make the decision that’s right for you and your partner. Take on your Dr’s advice but ultimately the only opinions that matter are you and DH xxx
Bear very excited for you! nesting frenzy sounds great - keeping everything crossable crossed for you!!
Jelly big hugs. I have just had a failed cycle (BFP but chemical / v early mc (5w) as the pregnancy failed to establish itself)
Medicated cycle is usually
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long protocol: down reg with buserelin (injections or nasal spray), then build up lining with oestrogen (pills and / or patches), then add in progesterone (pessaries / injections)
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short protcol: as above but without the down reg - start oestrogen off a natural cycle
My Dr prefers to do natural FET if possible, as he says the hormones your body naturally produces are superior to artificial ones. However most clinics prefer to do medicated as it’s easier to schedule and they have more control over the cycle
If you have bled early would they up your progesterone in a subsequent cycle? A friend bled early in her first FET and in her next FET she was put on progesterone injections as well as pessaries - and she’s now not far off giving birth after that transfer 9 months ago
AFM, well, I think we have a pretty good indication as to why this pregnancy failed to establish. I stopped my progesterone on Friday and today I’ve started to have a ‘period’ of sorts. However it’s following the same unhealthy pattern of bleeding as in previous cycles - pretty much exactly how my May fresh cycle (which was freeze all - so no transfer) went. I grew loads of thick lining which looked great on ultrasound, but then when my ‘period’ came, it was just black clotty gunge and brown spotting, no red flow or fresh blood at all. My consultant said although the lining looked great on ultrasound, there was obv some kind of quality issue going on, and the quality of my bleed suggested that if we had transferred into that endometrium, the cycle would have likely have been unsuccessful
I think that seems to be what is happening here - I’m obviousy hoping the black gunge will turn into a beautifully healthy Niagara Falls of red flow. But I don’t think that’s likely.
I'm just really sad. It's the second chromosomally normal embryo that hasn't made it and so it's my body that can't look after them. And I don't know how we fix it. We know the uterine environment looked good on a scan but obv something isn't right. Yes I had a bleed before this cycle (which is why we cancelled the hysto and started a treatment cycle), but we don't know why I didn't properly shed the 11mm of lining I grew in my May cycle - why I just got a day of black clots, and although lining thinned, I never got a bleed. And this seems to be what is happening again now.
There's other questions which we'll discuss in the follow up. Given I did successfully propagate a pregnancy into crappy lining with no immunes, but didn't into supposedly decent lining with pred / intralipids, question is whether they left me over suppressed. Prof Quenby and Brosens at the Coventry implantation / RM clinic say if uNK cells are on the low end (even if peripheral blood levels are high) that you need some inflammation for successful implantation, and that in some cases pred and intralipids can do more harm than good. I'm not sure that going to their clinic for the endometrial biopsy for uNK cells would add any clarity - from stalking the Quenby threads on FF it seems it could raise more questions than answers. Quite a few women get wildly different levels of uNK cells from one month to the next - which of course doesn't get you any closer to identifying whether pred would or wouldn't be beneficial in a treatment cycle. I'm minded to use my own history as a diagnostic - we know the embryos were both normal, so given I had decent implantation without immunes but didn't with immunes, I think if / when we eventually get to another treatment cycle
Follow up consult is arranged for a week on Friday. He’s put us in for the last appt of the day so we can take as much time as we need, he said he wanted to meet up so we could review everything step by step, and discuss where we go from here
The broad plan will be another hysteroscopy to check out the uterine environment. We had discussed putting in a copper IUD for 1-2 months to help support the endometrium, but this is TBC, to be discussed when we meet. He said if I get a bleed then I will restart progynova on day 2, to start to prepare the lining for a hysto & potentially a coil. I’d also taken him some studies about the use of another drug, a vasodilator called pentoxifylline, alongside estrogen therapy in women with very thin endometrium, to prepare the lining for a treatment cycle.
The quality of this bleed is a pretty key diagnostic tbh. I’ve emailed his secretary to ask if I should count this as day 1 - if so then it’s back on the progynova in prep for a hysto
I don’t think I will be able to cycle again for a while, as we really need to work on the endometrium - we can’t keep doing rounds of stims with EC just to put back a frostie, and we need to get me menstruating properly. Ideally if we do the IUD plan I imagine we’d want to have another crack at a dummy medicated FET, to see if I respond better to HRT. We’d also mooted the idea of a Tamoxifen cycle, so that’s on my ever-growing list of questions