Back on the Rollercoaster!

I had it all planned out. For over a year, I knew exactly how it was going to happen. The timing was perfect, I knew how we would announce it, I designed props for the announcement, I had it all figured out. Or so I thought.

I thought this was going to be easy, after all, it was easy the first time, I had done it before and the success rates were supposedly better this time around. Turns out they weren’t. 

So when the nurse called me and started to deliver her news with “Unfortunately…”, I knew what was coming. I shook my head “no” to Katie, who was staring at me expectantly. She was just as surprised as I was. 

For the last two weeks I walked around thinking I was pregnant. Turns out, I’m not. I didn’t think it would effect me as much as it does, I thought I would be fine if we got bad news. I tried to prepare myself for it, I kept telling myself that it didn’t work, that we wouldn’t be lucky like this twice in a row. But I guess deep down I thought that it worked, that we would have a November baby, just like we planned it for so long. 

We started this process back in October, when we had our first consultation with the doctor. It was the same clinic that we had used for Fox, but a different doctor, since our beloved Dr. J had since changed clinics and wasn’t working there anymore. We considered switching to his new clinic, but ultimately didn’t feel comfortable transporting our precious embryos, so we decided to stay with this new doctor, that we had met a few times when we went though this process with Fox, and we knew, we didn’t like. We should’ve taken this as our first cue.

In November, I went in for some testing and procedures and everything looked great. I started birth control in December, which literally made me a crazy biatch. I was nauseous for days and when the nausea finally lifted, I started to get moody and depressed and didn’t like how I felt on it at all. They reassured me that it was the exact same pill that I took with Fox, but I didn’t remember any of those side effects back then. 

Dealing with the fertility clinic was a nightmare and there was one red flag after the other, to the point, that we were considering once again to transfer our embryos to Dr. J. The nurse, that was assigned to us was rude and always unavailable. They even lost my blood once and I had to come back for another blood draw. To top that, they tried to charge me for that repeat blood draw. 

In January, I started on more medications, and then again more in February, followed by blood work and ultrasounds. On February 23rd, I had my embryo transfer. 

When I got into the room, the embryologist showed me a picture of the embryo and told me it was an “AB”. I was really surprised, because when we had our consultation in October, the doctor had told us that we had 8 “AA’s” out of the 14 embryos we had left, which is the best quality embryo. And now I was told, there were no “AA’s”. I never received an answer to what happened or why I was given incorrect information. 

The medication I was on made me really tired and dizzy, which was another symptom I didn’t remember experiencing three years ago. I asked the nurse why I was on different medication than before (besides the birth control) and she kind of snapped at me, stating that was their protocol. No other explanation was offered. 

And here we are. Not pregnant. 

I have all the right answers in my head. It wasn’t our time. This wasn’t our baby. There’s a plan. We are lucky to have Fox. We are lucky to have each other. 

But my heart still hurts. While I didn’t forget how hard this process was during those 14 months we tried to have Fox, I forgot the heartache that comes with it. I’m mad at myself for feeling this way, because I KNOW that this is out of our control, that God has a plan for us, that there’s a baby waiting for us somewhere, when the time is right. 

I know I’ll feel better when there’s a plan of action. Because right now, there’s just a blank space and we will have to make a lot of decisions on how to proceed. 

We are talking about switching clinics again and we would like to talk more about genetic testing with our doctor. We had talked about it briefly in October, but ultimately decided against it, because we didn’t feel comfortable messing with the embryo, if it wasn’t necessary (which the doctor said it wasn’t). While the doctor told us that there was no harm for the embryos, it still didn’t feel right to us. But then I think about our half sibling mom (who used the same donor as us), who had three failed transfers before she finally got the embryos tested and then found out, that they were all abnormal. She said, she wished she had tested them earlier, to save herself a lot of money and heartache.

And as a funny side note...those embryos were ALL boys! Which makes our grand total 15 boys and one girl that we know of! I can't wait to see how many boys are in our batch, if we decide to test them!

While transferring a frozen embryo is much cheaper than doing a fresh cycle, it is still very expensive. To put things into perspective, we paid $26,000 plus meds for Fox’s cycle (which didn’t include all the failed attempt we made before) and this cycle cost us about $4000. Still a hard pill to swallow. I'm not sure how much the genetic testing will be, I heard about $4000, but we will have to see what the new doctor will recommend. 

Because of work schedules, we won’t be able to try again until at least May, so that’s a bummer. But then again, if we do switch doctors, we probably need that time to get everything situated and transferred. I’m also glad to get off these medications for a little bit and hopefully feel like myself again. 

So while we won’t have a 2017 baby like we had planned it, I hope there will be a 2018 baby for us.