After trying for about 2 years, we had fertility testing done which found no problems with either of us. Fertility specialists said I could maybe have scarring in my tubes but they’d ideally want to do a laproscopy to check but recommended not bothering because next step either way would be ivf. I had to lose some weight before qualifying for ivf on the nhs so we continued trying another 3 years with zero success. Almost at the bmi threshold but we found a clinic in Ireland we really liked the vibe of and decided to take the plunge and go for it before getting any older (I was 32 at the time).
The private fertility testing showed no problems with me, my tubes were clear (they did a HyCoSi dye test) but husband had a few problems - 2% morphology, 10-50% MAR IGA and high viscosity. We were told though we’re still ‘unexplained’ because even with his results we should still have gotten pregnant in the 5 years we’d been trying. We proceeded with ICSI, got 17 eggs out of me, 12 mature, 11 fertilised, all 11 going good at day 2/3 then the weekend came and the call on Monday (day 5) was that we only had 1 blast. They were keeping an eye on the others in case any more developed by the next day. All in all we got one day 5 3Ab and one day 6 5Bb. I was devastated - I expected a big drop but not quite that big. Due to being 32 and the additional cost, we did not pgta test. Both embryos frozen due to being at a higher risk of OHSS.
First FET with the day 5 3Ab implanted but sadly resulted in miscarriage around 6 weeks. Looking into this, it’s likely due to chromosomal issues I.e. probably would have tested aneuploid if we’d done pgta - likelihood of euploid embryo at 32 is around 60% so it was devastating at the time but should probably have considered that a little more.
Second embryo was a day 6 5Bb. Our clinic used embryoscope which monitored the embryos throughout culture and they also had a software installed that gave each embryo a score out of 10 as a success predictor - based on data from hundreds of thousands of previous transfers. Our embryo was given 2.7 out of 10 chance of success. Scientific studies I saw online have quite a low % of success for anything scoring below a 7 so we were pretty sure this transfer would be unsuccessful. However, I had reached the nhs bmi threshold and we decided to give the embryo a go in January this year (33yo now) before starting the process again with the nhs.
I’m just starting to feel the first flutters of movement from that 2.7/10 embryo - ‘very low risk’ NIPT test, all scans perfect so far, currently 17+3 with our little miracle girl.
Its only the beginning of your journey, and I really wish you a short and uneventful ivf journey from here 🤞🏼♥️ Best of luck mumma, you got this xx