How many cycles before BFP?

[Willow21]

I'm interested to know how many cycles people have gone through before having success

We've had 2x 'fresh' rounds and 3 FET rounds. All failed

I just want to see what the average is. I know everyone is different and has differing reasons for infertility but right now we feel quite unlucky but I wonder if maybe that's the 'norm' to have fails before success ?

I got a BFP on my 2nd cycle - but miscarried at 10w.3rd cycle was freeze all for PGS so no transfer. FET (with one of the PGS tested embryos from that cycle) was also BFP but mc at 5w

I'd say 'take home baby' (I hate the term 'live birth') was the more important stat than BFP

We've had 2 transfers (both genetically normal embryos) and 2 BFPs. But no baby.

We have 5 chromosomally normal embryos left and I've set a maximum of 2 more transfers before we accept I can't sustain a pregnancy, and move onto surrogacy with our remaining blasts.

Icsi1 - one 3d embryo - BFN - nil frozen
Icsi 2 - one 5AA blast - BFN - 1 frozen
FET - one 4AA frozen - BFP - chemical
Icsi 3 - one 4CC - BFP - M/c 5+ weeks - nil frozen

So in total 3 full cycles and no take home baby. I have no idea if we are just unlucky. Male factor is our issue, but we are now awaiting DNA fragmentatoon results. If that is high, we might need to go back to the drawing board.
Massive luck with your journey
X

Sanfran with DNA fragmentation IMSI can be helpful, as well as PGS. Good luck xx

5th ivf got me preg for the first time ever in my life. I'm 43 and almost 18w preg

Having 5 go's willow and nothing is quite unlucky - tho I thought this one would fail and didn't

Seemed everyone on these boards (when I was reading and failing) usually gets a bfp in a few cycles tho sadly not all are viable or last and sadly end in mc

What has your clinic said?

What age are you?

Are your eggs /embryos good quality? Do you have back 3/5day?

TBH I don't think I have read about anyone else on this forum who had 4failed goes and got preg on 5th or even 5 goes as you have and no bfp

Most seemed to have got preg within 3 cycles - tho obv not everyone as I can't read every single post - but that was how it felt to me that I had constant failure while others got lucky

Depends whether you're switching protocols / clinics

Trying different stims?
Trying different lab techniques?
PGS?
Immunes?

Is the problem the seed or the soil?

You can have perfect embryos and an implantation issue - BFN or mc

You can have duff embryos and no implantation issue - BFN or mc

You can have duff embryos and an implantation issue - BFN or mc

You can tinker with the variables but really IMO you need the data to make informed decisions about what variables to tinker with

PGS - are the embryos any good
Immunes testing - is there an implantation issue?
ERA - is the lining receptive?
Uterine cavity assessment - is the uterine environment right?

You can throw everything and see what sticks but unless you know if it's the seed or the soil it's hard to know what problem you're trying to solve

Also remember embryo grading means nothing

I had 5 'top quality' blasts in my second cycle

All graded AB or AA

One of the AA was put back - BFP but miscarried. We tested the products of conception and found out that one was chromosomally normal. So we knew the mc was a soil problem

However we then our remaining 4 frozen embryos PGS tested.

Aged 34 and with supposedly top quality embryos, statistically at least one of them should have been chromosomally normal

Nope. All duds

Embryo grading is just a beauty contest

It doesn't say anything about the genetic integrity of the embryo

My third round we got 6 normals out of 9 tested

The 3 abnormals were all top quality

So I would take embryo grading with a pinch of salt

Just because it looks good under a microscope doesn't mean it has the potential to become a person

Have you had parental karotyping and sperm aneuploidy tests done as well?

All day 3s. Except most recent which was a blastocyst 4BC (The 4AB did not survive thawing process)

Two day 3s left frozen so will use those and if they fail then will look again with our doctor as to what could be wrong.
Not heard of parental karyotyping will check that out. Likewise other things mentioned I will go back over this thread

One thing I have noticed is that everyone seems to have symptoms on medications progesterone especially I have nothing. Felt normal each time and I knew it hadn't worked as felt so normal. It's like my body just can't iyswim

I haven't had any symptoms from progesterone in either cycle

With my first pregnancy my progesterone and hCG levels were terrific and had a fab strong heartbeat (until sudden foetal demise at 9w 3) but zero symptoms. Symptoms mean nothing!

With day 3 embryos you don't have as much information as blasts

Not all embryos that make it to blast will be chromosomally normal (as my PGS shows)

But any embryos that don't make it to blast are pretty much guaranteed to be chromosomally abnormal

The embryology lab also told me that euploid embryos generally survive the thaw. Not all embryos that successfully thaw will be chromosomally normal, but any embryos which don't survive the thaw were pretty much guaranteed to have been abnormal (unless your clinic has a shit lab who don't use vitrification)

If you transfer at day 3 you just don't know enough about your embryos. My consultant generally advises patients who have day 3 embryos frozen to leave them in the dish till day 5 once thawed. I personally wouldn't transfer at day 3 either - my 4 embryos in my first cycle all arrested after day 3 and nothing made it to blast. We had nothing to transfer - but the outcome would have been BFN or mc with such duff embryos, but we got more info about the embryos

If you're not going to do PGS then worth leaving till day 5 in the embryoscope - ideally if clinic has EAVA then the algorithm can monitor the embryo development and judge whether they think the embryos have the potential to become a person. Not accurate like PGS but more information than just leaving in the dish.

Does your clinic treat empirically for immunes? Or would you go to the Coventry clinic to have the endometrial biopsy?

Willow - a friend of mine had a mix of fresh and frozen rounds - all negative until her fifth transfer. She is due her twins in a few weeks. It can happen.

I went to Coventry and recommend it. I feel comfortable now that I have normal level of Natural Killer cells. However the sampling/scratch they do is quite unpleasant (but I would have it every day of the week if it gets me preggers).

Banana - do you mind me asking why you have PGS? Do you have a male factor issue? I know about IMSI but not available in my area. We are also looking at HAB/PICSI.
I feel like I am getting to the desperate stage where I am willing to try anything!

SanFranDreaming we did PGS as a diagnostic as much as anything. We don’t have any male factor - DH has Olympic swimmers, it’s me that’s broken.

My second cycle I got a BFP, but mc at 10w. We paid to have the tissue tested after the ERPC, and that showed that the baby was chromosomally normal - i.e. the problem was me, not the embryo. My endometrium has been a persistent issue, plus the foetal demise was so sudden, that although my thrombophilia tests had all been clear, we couldn’t rule out compromised foetal blood flow

So we knew the issue was the uterine environment. However if we put an untested embryo back, if the cycle failed or I miscarried, we wouldn’t know if we had cracked the uterine environment but the embryo was a dud - or if the embryo was normal but we hadn’t cracked the uterine environment.

So without that information, we wouldn’t know what to change the following cycle, because we wouldn’t know what was working and what wasn’t.

PGS on our 4 frosties showed ALL were abnormal. So if we had done 4 FET with those embryos, every cycle would have failed / miscarried. But we wouldn’t have known if the problem was the seed or the soil. We’d have assumed both, and then after transferring 5 embryos with no baby, we would have given up.

Our third round was much more successful. Out of 9 blasts tested, 6 were normal.

So when we did our recent FET, we knew that the seed was good by only transferring a normal embryo- so when I miscarried again, we knew that we still hadn’t cracked the uterine environment

Hence why we are currently doing several preparatory cycles to work on my lining before we have another crack at a transfer cycle. Two cycles with a copper IUD and HRT, then the plan is to do a dummy FET with endometrial biopsies to see what the lining is actually doing under the microscope, and not just what it’s showing us on ultrasound (not the Coventry uNK cells biopsy, standard biopsy for histology in the first half of the cycle, then 5 days after starting progesterone we’ll do the ERA biopsy)

PGS has been an invaluable diagnostic, otherwise we wouldn’t know what was working and what wasn’t.

It’s also let us set a sensible limit. We will call it a bust on my own body after two more transfers, as that would be a total of 4 genetically normal embryos and no baby - so it wouldn’t be a case of keep trying and hope we get a good egg, we would have to accept that my uterus is unable to sustain a pregnancy. We would therefore keep the remaining 3 frozen genetically normal blasts for transfer to a surrogate - as if my uterus isn’t up to the job, our best chance of having a baby would be to transfer into someone else’s.

We did PGS after ‘only’ one miscarriage, but without having done the genetic testing - on both the baby we lost, and the embryos we had made - we simply wouldn’t have the right information to be able to give us the best chance of success.