Unhealthy Living

I haven’t had time to blog. I’ve been too busy making up for a year of consumptive abstinence by gorging on treat after delicious and unhealthy treat. On Sunday, the eve of our first anniversary, J the Elder impressed me to no end by disappearing into the kitchen after dinner and emerging twenty minutes later with Nutella crepes he’d just made. I showed immense restraint by having just three of them. On our anniversary the next day we went to our favourite sushi restaurant for dinner. It just so happens that there’s a Krispy Kreme right next door to it and it seemed like a splendid idea to get in line at the drive-through (why do they make it so easy?) and pick up one or two small doughnuts on the way home (well, four actually). On Tuesday I was back at work in my office at home when there was a knock on the door and a nice man from UPS handed over a box containing nine cupcakes, sent from California to our door by a friend of J the Elder’s who lives in Oklahoma and had lost a bet with J over the outcome of the Florida/Oklahoma championship game. Since there was a three-day freshness guarantee, we were obliged to consume these cupcakes by Friday and did so very stoically and without grumbling, ending our dinner with them every evening from Tuesday to Friday. Does putting on running clothes count? If it does, I did get a great workout yesterday without ever going outside or breaking into a sweat. I did intend to run, but it just didn’t seem to happen. Then last night we went out to meet an old colleague and friend of mine from Australia who was in town on business. It would’ve been extremely rude of me not to have those four vodka and cranberry juice drinks. I’ve often heard that the early pregnancy feeling is very similar to a hangover. If that really is so, I feel pregnant this morning. Very pregnant.

We had a telephone regroup with the doctor at CCRM earlier this week. Unfortunately it didn’t have the desired effect of making us feel any better. We were given a 35-40% chance of a successful pregnancy if we only have the one existing normal embryo from last cycle to transfer. Those don’t seem like very good odds, after all we’ve done to get to this point. Obviously we’re still trying to be hopeful about the three embryos that are being tested from this cycle, but it remains difficult to be too hopeful. The dilemma now is whether, if we don’t get another normal embryo to transfer, we should go ahead and transfer the one we have or whether we should somehow try to do another cycle, locally or at CCRM. It’s not only about increasing our chances of getting pregnant with one healthy baby with the transfer of two embryos. At this point we’ve got nothing and we don’t want to be greedy, but strategically, if we think we’d want to do another cycle for a sibling after one baby was born, then it would be much better to retrieve eggs now than next year.

It’s not immediately clear how we would afford a fourth out-of-pocket cycle, but if we could and went back to Denver, CCRM wouldn’t put me on birth control pills again, because of my Protein S deficiency and the resulting risk of blood clotting. They would also try Gonal-F only, rather than a combination of Gonal-F and Menopur. I did far better locally without birth control pills and without Menopur. In terms of protocol, they would either use Long Lupron again, or Antagonist. I need to read up on the Antagonist protocol before I can form a preference. The doctor didn’t seem to push one over the other and I’d always rather see a clear choice, since it would just make me feel as though the solution is obvious, rather than this being the Russian Roulette it really is.

If we decided to do another local cycle, it would cost us somewhat less, mostly in travel and hotel costs, but we wouldn’t be able to do CGH or microarray testing of all 23 chromosomes, because the local clinic doesn’t offer it. Instead we’d ask for a five-day biopsy and traditional PGS (pre-implantation genetic screening) on the blasts, to at least test for nine chromosomes. Usually this test is done on three-day embryos and then the normal ones are transferred two days later, but we wouldn’t want to put our three-day embryos through that, since they only have six to ten cells at that point and by taking out one or two of those cells for testing, you’re removing a high percentage of their genetic material. Also, it’s recently been reported that there are many false positives with this technique, meaning that some embryos might test positive for chromosomal abnormalities, but are, in fact, normal. Doing a five-day biopsy would mean vitrifying the embryos and transferring them in a subsequent cycle, which, while adding more time, does have the advantage of the body getting rid of all the stimulation drugs. If we did the local cycle, we’d probably arrange for any normal embryo/s to be shipped to CCRM so that we’d be able to transfer two together.

Of course this discussion is entirely academic until we get our results, because if we do have one more normal embryo, we’ll transfer the two at the earliest opportunity. However, as anyone who is going through fertility treatments knows, it helps to have a plan in place so that you’re not floundering and too upset to make a well thought-out decision should bad news come in.