We Put the F in IVF
It's been 3.5 months since our last post as we neared the end of our first IVF cycle (the fact that I refer to it as our first should be a clue as to how it went), and those few months already feel like they were a million years ago. As the title of this post says, we put the F in IVF, in more ways than one:
F as in fertilization, which apparently we are awesome at (yay Ben?)!
But also F as in...we failed.
And also as in FUCK THIS SHIT and just FUCKING FUCKKKK this whole thing (sorry mom and dad).
I wanted to use this space to document the ins and outs of the IVF process, I really did, but truth be told, at this point it's in the rearview mirror and I just do not have the emotional energy to relive every (disappointing) step. There are other blogs out there who do that wonderfully and gracefully, but alas, despite my hopes and best attempts, this is not going to be one of them.
To sum it up very briefly, our IVF journey lasted two months (October-December 2020) and ended with a total of one low-quality, genetically-inconclusive frozen embryo.
For those curious and/or who don't speak IVF, I will try to expand a little further...from our first IVF cycle in October, after stabbing myself in the stomach day and night and injecting myself with various hormones for, we ended up with 9 eggs retrieved on Day 0 (i.e. a lot considering my old lady ovaries), 4 of which were mature (i.e. potentially useable), 3 of which fertilized on Day 1 (i.e. had a chance of turning into actual human babies), but zero of which grew and survived until Day 5 (i.e. the requisite length of time/development needed to be considered "viable."). To put it bluntly, this was the worst possible outcome we could have had. A month of hormones, doctor visits, ultrasounds, and blood draws (not to mentioned $23k in treatments and medications), and we had literally nothing to show for it.
Truth be told, before we were even through the first cycle I was ready to be done with it all. The hormones made me feel absolutely insane (as if the previous 10 months of pregnancy/miscarriage hormones weren't enough), made it hard to concentrate and focus, and just generally made me feel off. The shots themselves weren't that bad, but their effects made me feel crappy at best and downright awful at worst. Between pain, fatigue, and depression from the whole process I was essentially confined to the couch for the last quarter of 2020 (on the plus side, I had a lot of time to watch true crime documentaries and knit, so I can't say it was all bad).
However, despite my insistence mid-first cycle that I was NEVER EVER DOING THIS AGAIN no matter what, the fact that our first cycle was a complete and utter failure convinced me to try again (I have never been one to easily accept defeat). For the record this was completely my decision, as Ben was 100% on board to do (or not do) whatever I was up for. It just so happened that I had this revelation at the last possible day I could have had it in order to get on the November schedule, so we ended up doing two cycles back-to-back.
And so we tried again, which went essentially the same as the first time, with some extras: extra hormone treatments (in patch form which, 3 months later, I still have scars on my stomach from), extra $$$, but, ultimately, also an extra embryo. Just one: the aforementioned low-quality embryo (yes, they get graded, and somehow two people who are not used to getting anything below good to perfect scores made an embryo that got the lowest score possible) that wasn't even able to be tested for genetic viability (i.e. THE ENTIRE REASON WE DID IVF IN THE FIRST PLACE).
All that to say: this one embryo is our only chance at having a biological child together, and that if/when we try to move forward, it will more than likely end in another miscarriage and all of our infertility treatments will have been for naught.
We knew going into IVF that our best hope was to come out of it with one useable embryo, and if we were anyone else, we would be ecstatic that we even have one. But we aren't and have never been normal people or a normal couple, and going through everything we went through over those two months and, more broadly, the year prior, we just felt crushed when we got the news that all of our efforts had only produced one embryo that has a very low chance of being viable if/when we do transfer it. We had gone through so much just for a sliver of hope, and we were left with barley a thin thread to hang onto.
Quick aside for some logistics housekeeping and to put the timeline into perspective: if our October IVF cycle had given us any useable embryos, our plans was to do a transfer in early December, meaning we'd be about 12 weeks pregnant now. I knew before that October cycle was over that regardless of whether we had embryos at the end or not, I was not yet ready to go through a pregnancy, and so we decided at that point that any embryos we got - either from our October cycle or our November cycle - we'd keep frozen until (if?) we were ready to move forward with a transfer (i.e. implanting it into my uterus, which is the scientific way of saying getting pregnant).
The way that IVF splits up every part of the process of getting pregnant, from the fertilization of the egg to its implantation, is still so strange and surreal to me, but in a way I'm grateful for it. It's strange to have to make decisions at every step of a process that would otherwise be made by nature, but at the same time, it's helped me feel some sense of control over a process that I know I ultimately have no control over whatsoever. I've been able to really look inward at every step, and when it's felt like too much, I've been able to hit the brakes.
And I suppose that leads me to the present: it's been over 2 months since our last IVF cycle and we have one embryo literally just chilling in the freezer. We decided together during our second cycle in November that we wanted to put off the transfer of any embryos we might get for a year or more, as we felt like we needed that time to process everything we've been through, to rebuild both ourselves and our marriage. We are so lucky that our decade-long marriage has been relatively easy thus far, but infertility hit us both like a ton of bricks, and I'm not ashamed to say that it has taken a lot of time and a amount of significant work on both of our parts to get through it together. We have been challenged in the last year in ways I never in my wildest dreams thought we would be, both individually and as a couple. Frankly, there were a couple brief periods we both thought we might not make it through. That's the truth. This has been the hardest, ugliest, most hopeless year we've ever been through, together or separately.
A year ago if you had asked me how I was feeling, I would have told you I was drowning. I wanted to walk into the ocean and never come out. I wanted to throw my entire life, all 32 years of it thus far, into a garbage can and light it on fire. I really mean that, and I tried at least a couple times, metaphorically speaking. A year later, and a few months out from infertility and related treatments, I'm doing better. I no longer recognize the person I was a year ago, but I also know she'll always be deep down inside me somewhere. This experience has changed me forever - there are days when I recognize the positive side of that, when I celebrate it, but most days I just feel it weighing me down, how it feels like everything I used to be able to do I now do with bricks attached to my feet.