Due to start Stims any day now…! Anyone else?

[ivfjourneyandme]

Hi all,

I know there is a November thread but most ladies seem further ahead. I’m waiting for AF to show (4 days if she behaves) and then start stims

This is my first cycle so would love to go through this with as many as possible.

36yr old, AMH 1.9, AFC 3 and severe MFI. We’re having IVF with ICSI, DP is providing a sample next week as well to be frozen as a precaution incase he doesn’t produce many on the day.

Much love to all the incredibly brave ladies on this journey ❤️

@Omgdnswv where are you?
Yes, they did call this morning. 8 out of the 11 eggs were mature and 5 of them have fertilised. 2 didn't fertilised and 1 fertilised abnormally.

I'm feeling good today. Very little twinging but nothing major. I'm hoping we will have a good embryos on Friday for the transfer.

Good luck with the development of our embryos!!

What do you mean by fertilised abnormally? Is that something they just see or are you having special tests done? I don't think my eggs get tested in any way cause there's no indication that there are genetic risk factors (DH and I actually had our DNA checked for something or other, i think it was called translocation, which seems to be recommended/normal procedure if you haven't conceived in a long time).

We're in Germany, but started TTC in England, so basically this year here we went through everything that the ca 2 years with the NHS did and then some (except for hycosy and trying Letrozole, as they accepted the hycosy results and said there's no point doing letrozole again as it didn't work and it's obvs. Mostly due to male factor, even if I don't ovulate naturally every cycle)

@OrientalPinkLily best of luck for your transfer today

@Omgdnswv I just saw your earlier message, sorry. No, they don't do any special testing, the embryologist monitors the formation of the embryo, the devision of the cells might be abnormal.

All good with embryo transfer today, we had a very good quality embryo. I hope it sticks...

@OrientalPinkLily how many did you have in the end?
Of the 4 they cultivated 1 made it to be implanted. Quick and easy procedure, although maybe I shouldn't have had a look when they brought the thing with it in because it just looked like a really long needle, which was creepy, but obviously you couldn't feel anything really.
I guess if 4 cells made 1 blastocyst, that means my remaining 9 frozen cells will be 2, with luck 3, potential future attempts should this one fail.

Now I need to figure out how to pass the time until I'm allowed to test. Are you testing on the 28th as well or a different day?

@Omgdnswv they just called me from the clinic. Of the 4 embryos, 3 are borderline for freezing. They use a scale of 0-10 (with 10 being the best). One is a 3, one is a 5 and one is a 6.
We will freeze them anyway.
You never know, the one they transferred was a 10/10! And the rest are a lot worse, it's weird. This means that from your 9, they could all be good quality. It's not proportional.
I'm testing 27th December, a day earlier than you. Fingers crossed for positive results!

It's strange how much it can vary between people, from how many collected to fertilised to actually make it far enough to consider
transferring.
Well, I wish you a merry Christmas (or what else you may celebrate) and I'll check back in when I know if it worked. Best of luck!

Merry Christmas! I will probably be the first one to update the chat!
Best of luck!

@OrientalPinkLily I hope you had a nice Christmas, how did your test turn out?

I'm a bit confused about mine. I was impatient and actually tested daily from 3 days after the transfer, tracking the fading of the positive from the trigger shot. Until it didn't fade but grew stronger. For about 3 days I was fairly obviously pregnant and then on the 25th the line was suddenly only half as strong and on the 26th it was completely gone. But now this morning if we strain our eyes we can see the faintest ghost of a line and I don't know what to think anymore but I guess it'll probably just be the last remnants of a pregnancy that only lasted a few days.

I hope you had more luck (and less confusion)

Hey @Omgdnswv sorry to hear that. When are you meeting your consultant?
Unfortunately I don't have better news, I had a negative test yesterday, I stopped taking progesterone pessaries last night and I got my period straight away.
I was expecting it to be negative tbh as I was 14 days postbtransfer and had absolutely no symptoms.
I am meeting my consultant on the 9th January.

Had a good Christmas, thank you! I hope you had a good one too.

Not sure when I'll meet my doctor next, they're on Christmas break until the 7th of Januar but already said that they would do 1 month of rest for the body before moving on to a frozen transfer. I guess there'd be at least one appointment in that month to make sure everything is good to go for the frozen transfer, just like they did before the stimulation (they checked for cysts for example, which I think can happen quite quickly so might need to check before each round? I have to admit I haven't really looked further than how the first one works and just assumed a FET will just be an easier version of that).
I've kept taking the progesterone today and guess I will until I can't see a line at all, just in case.

I'm quite glad I tested early as on one hand I know that it implanted and there wasn't a problem with that step and on the other hand I did have symptoms for about a week (sore breasts and cramping/lower back pain like just before a period) so if I hadn't known that it did work for a bit I would have thought I had imagined it all (when first starting TTC I used to read too much into random feelings but was never pregnant, now I know what my real symptoms would be, especially as I never had those before

Definitely continue taking your medication until your clinic tells you to stop. Also, as long as you are seeing a line it might be OK in the end? You can't have a definite conclusion until seen by the doctor/nurse.
I didn't test early, I only tested on my official test day, so don't know what happened (ever implanted or never)
I have no idea what a FET involves, I am hoping I will be able to start in February.
I am definitely out, but you still have a positive test, is the clinic closed until the 7th? Have you called to tell them about your tests?

Well, the line is completely gone this morning, so I've packed up the progesterone for the next attempt.

The clinic is closed until the 7th, normally they would have done a blood test but as they are closed for this time they said I could just go to my gynecologist if I get a positive result, as medical care during the pregnancy is the gynecologists responsibility anyways and a positive bloodtest would have been the last task to conclude our interaction.
I will send them an email outlining the results and call on the 7th (there's an emergency number but obviously this isn't an emergency) and see when they next want to see me.

I have some hormone pills that I need to take when my period comes to ensure I don't fall back into 40-70 day cycles, so at least the timing should be fairly predictable.

Maybe we can keep this thread up between the two of us as we are still on a very similar timeline, so it'll be like going through it together.

I see. I'm sorry to hear you don't have a positive test anymore 😔 it's really hard, isn't it? I hope you're managing OK. I find it hard but because it's the festive season and we're busy all the time, I don't really have time to think about it. It might hit me hard in January...
Yes sure, can chat here.

I'm handling it better than I thought I would, I guess it's part that I have hope of it working with one of the cells in the freezer and part that we have gotten further than ever before, this being the only positive test I've ever had. It implanted once, so it can happen again.

I also never had any illusions that a faint positive would be a guarantee. I've told quite a few people about our fertility treatments, and the ones that knew when the transfer was were all told not to expect an update as I did not want to have to ruin any good news in case things went downhill later on. The odds of losing it at week 3/4 are around 20-30% (I looked that up after it happened, I knew it was fairly high, but did not expect it quite that high)

January will be a long month, I think. All that waiting and nothing you can do really.
Was your period stronger than usual? I had quite strong (for me) cramping late last night (actually got up at 1 a.m. to make a hot water bottle) and this morning I almost had a mess on my hands as I started full flow bleeding overnight, which doesn't really ever happen with me either. Luckily I put a panty liner in when I got up with cramps, as I had my suspicions and that is normally enough for the first half day.
I had a rough count of days and my guess is that my FET could happen sometime around Valentine's day, obviously depending on the length of this cycle.

Yes, my period is very painful this time. Also, I think it will last longer than normal. My period always lasts for 5 days, 5th day is tomorrow but I have such high flow today that there is no chance tomorrow will.be my last day of bleeding.
I can't calculate timings for FET, I have no idea what the protocol looks like and what are the steps.
I have 3 frozen embryos. My husband is very positive that it will happen for us with one of those 3 but they were all worse quality than the one we transferred which makes me very sceptical. However, I do read that embryos that are classed not great quality can implant and lead to live births but this can't stop me from thinking that I have lower chances with those embryos.

Okay, I was wondering if it was due to the couple of days of implantation, but maybe it's just the hormone treatments in general, maybe the progesterone, causing extra lining that needs to be cleared out.

I don't know about odds of success with different ratings, but I thought most cases of implantation failure and early loss are due to some genetic or chromosomal damage, so if you're 10/10 looked good but there was some underlying problem that does not mean that the less promising looking ones can't be perfectly healthy.
Also, when there's multiple potentials they always pick the best one first, don't they? But people often only get pregnant on their 2nd or 3rd attempt, so there must be plenty of "mediocre" embryos that turn into perfectly healthy pregnancies even after the highest rated one didn't.

As for timing, I just calculated roughly when I'd expect my next period and then assumed that, as it would be a day 5 blastocyst, that it would happen 5 days after I would ovulate on the next cycle. I don't know if I actually will but I assume if they were to block ovulation that might also affect the build up of the lining. I'm wondering if they'll just do a trigger to get me to ovulate at the right time for my cells to be thawed and then cultured for 5 days. Maybe I'll read up on the process in the next few days.

Yes, you are correct on the embryo quality/rating, implantation chances and chromosomal abnormalities. I did not do PGT-A, we don't know where we stand regarding euploid/aneuploid and that was my choice. I know that nature can some times correct abnormalities, and I prefer to.give a chance to any of my embryos. We will never know for sure but chances are that the one transferred was aneuploid.
I tried doing some reading about FET today, there is a natural option and a medicated one. The medicated one is a lot more controlled and from what I read, some clinics always prefer the medicated route. If I do a medicated one, my FET will be around valentines day too.

Ours aren't tested either, the option was never brought up and I assume it would cost a fair bit of money to do. I'm also not sure if it would be covered by health insurance, especially as neither DH nor I have any issues in our DNA that could be passed on like that.
I think they like testing for these things if you have 3 or more failed transfers in a row, but I read that somewhere on MN so is probably highly dependent on your area and provider and such.

Are you on the NHS or private?
We're with a government insurance (so NHS equivalent) and they have to cover 50% of the costs of up to 3 of the big cycles. Ours also let's us claim back 500€ out of the cost that we had to carry once the treatment is completed, so when the bill comes flying in and gets paid we can recoup a bit of the cost, but they don't cover the cost of freezing and storage, and I'm not sure if they cover FETs.

I think with my irregular cycle I'd have to have some sort of medication to guide it, otherwise it must be quite difficult to know when to freeze the cells as they still need to do the 5 days of growing in a lab.

I actually had a dream last night that they cultivated 4 more cells and then rolled a dice to see how many made it to blastocyst and the die showed 6! 😅I guess even on a subconscious level I can't stop thinking about it

Yes, PGT-A comes with a cost... our clinic quoted £355 per embryo.
We're not NHS funded as we do have a daughter. We started the ivf procedure through the NHS in 2021 and just before medication was ordered, I got pregnant! We don't qualify for funding anymore but I do have private cover through work that does cover a cost. Once you exceed that, you need to pay yourself but so far we are covered for everything. Depending on how our ivf journey goes, we might need to start paying ourselves at some point. But financially it's all good for now.

Gosh, that is a lot of money.
Where we were in the UK we would have been allowed 1 cycle on the NHS but only after 3 years of trying unsuccessfully (and then obviously you would be in a waiting list and nobody can tell you for how long). In Germany, if you managed to get a child through IVF/ICSI then the 3 cycles at half price reset once, so you can have a 2nd child, although we won't benefit from that as my husband would be past the age restriction by then, so I'm hoping to have some left in the freezer for a sibling so it's only roughly 800€ for a transfer instead of 3.6k for a full egg stimulation and meds and extraction and transfer stuff (if I remember my numbers correctly)

@OrientalPinkLily I had my pre-cycle check today, all looking good. I'm expecting my period either this weekend or just after and the plan is to take estrogen for 12 days to build up a good lining for the transfer.
Looks like things will happen before Valentines after all.

How are you doing? When are the next steps happening for you?

Hey @Omgdnswv very similar! Jad meeting with the consultant on the 9th January. Had my nurse planning meeting last Friday. I will start oestrogen on the first day of my cycle which will possibly be this Saturday. Will be on that for 12-14 days, they'll book me.in for a scan and monitor the lining thickening. If all goes well and there no issues, I believe my transfer will be around the 13th of Feb.
My medication is arriving tomorrow.
We are on very similar timings, fingers crossed this will be our cycle!

@Omgdnswv I actually started oestrogen today, my period was early. I have my scan in the 3rd of Feb.

@OrientalPinkLily oh how exciting! Best of luck. I'll be a few days behind you then.
Still taking hormones until including Thursday, the the earliest my period could come is Friday, but I think Sunday or Monday are the most likely.