Blind hope and more...

I realized that in the midst of my post yesterday that I forgot to update on what the treatment will be for our poor embryo quality. Even though he was concerned about the poor quality of the embryos at the end of the fertilization, he agrees that they were going along perfectly at day 3 which is why, as I mentioned in the previous post, we’ll go with a day three instead of a day 5 transfer. What I forgot to mention was that we’ll also be doing a procedure called “assisted hatching” with our day three embryos. Basically, once the embryos get to day three, they will put a tiny drop of an acidic solution on the embryos to thin the outer shell of the embryos. When embryos attempt to implant, they have to break out of their ‘shell’ and they send cells out of the shell to attach to the uterus. If they apply this little bit of acid to the shell, the hope is that the cells will have an easier time breaking out and attaching to the uterus, thereby making implantation easier. If you Google the term “IVF Assisted hatching” you can read about how important AH has become in some IVF treatments. Our RE thinks that AH is our best chance on getting those embryos to attach and grow.

Despite the fact that I’m starting to get a nasty cold, I’m feeling much better about things. I’ll admit that it sucks having to start another IVF cycle all over again, but it feels good to still be doing something. It would have just killed me to take another few months off. Right now I’m just taking my daily birth control pill and anxiously awaiting the scheduling phone call from the RE’s IVF coordinator. With any luck I’ll be starting the Lupron injections in about two weeks. I hope you realize how perverse it is that I am excited about taking injections again.

A friend at work put me in touch with another IVF veteran whom I’ll call K. Like me, K had no known fertility problems. She had five (or six, she can’t remember) IUIs which all failed, two IVF’s which failed and then finally got pregnant with triplets on her third IVF attempt. It was so great to talk to someone who’s actually been through it before and even better to talk to someone who has been successful at it. It gave me this unbelievable sense of hope, something I’ve been struggling with since we lost all 12 embryos. She even used the same practice that I’m using, although with a different doctor.

K validated all the terrible things that I’ve been feeling and was a nice reminder that I am really not alone in this fight. As much as I can talk about this with R and with my best friend and with sympathetic friends at work, it just isn’t the same. It’s extremely difficult for all those people to really understand what I’m going through when they haven’t gone through it themselves. I could not do it without them, but it feels good when someone who’s done it says “You have to have hope because it WILL work for you!” Sometimes blind hope is all you need to keep you sustained for a little longer. Blind hope is all I’m clinging to these days. Blind hope and the deep feeling, almost an intuition, that it will work for us this time around. Which brings me to another point…

I realized the other night while perusing through some old posts on this blog that I haven’t been entirely honest about some of the things that I’ve been posting. I’ve held back some of the things I’ve been thinking because I was too afraid to jinx myself by putting them out there. I felt like if I wrote them down I would be admitting something that I didn’t want to admit and was afraid of what I might be manifesting by writing the thoughts down. Enough of that. It’s time to be honest with myself and if something goes through my head, it’s worth writing down even if it’s ugly. The reason I bring all of this up is because of a conversation I had with a friend (P) in the beginning of October. Before I had even started a single injection, before we officially started our first IVF cycle I stood at her desk and told her that I was certain that the first IVF cycle would fail but that the second would be a success. I don’t know where the thought came from and it didn’t really bother me all that much, but I was as certain of it as I am of my own name. And sure enough, the first cycle failed even though all the signs (pre-fertilization) were pointing to a successful cycle. P thought I was crazy, that I was going to jinx myself, but I told her as plain as I could that I was sure the first one would fail but something was telling me that the second cycle would work. Whether or not it was because we fixed the lining issue, or changed the protocol or what, it was just going to work.

And there you have it: honesty. I’m not saying that I’m forecasting a perfect second cycle, but I’m going along with that intuition that never seems to fail me. When I get these ‘feelings’, it’s almost like someone turns a light on in my head and shines it on the truth and whatever that intuition is just feels true. It’s hard to explain, but I had the same experience before I married R. Something ‘told’ me to marry him and I just knew it was the right thing to do. With that ‘feeling’, it just became a fact that it was the way it was supposed to be. The same thing happened when I got pregnant with E: that voice just said it worked and that I was pregnant. I didn’t even take a test until the day after my period was due and I still knew that it would be a positive test. There was no doubt in my mind and lo-and-behold, it was. Three weeks later, when I was about six weeks pregnant I had another ‘feeling’ that I was pregnant with a boy and a few months later, at our 21 week ultrasound they confirmed E was indeed a boy. These ‘feelings’ just happen and I can’t remember one time when I really believed in it that it wasn’t true. And the same thing happened when I had the conversation with P; I really believed that the first one wasn’t going to work, but the second cycle would.

And as I embark on this cycle, I’m going to let that feeling about this IVF journey sustain me. Those feelings haven’t been wrong yet. I’m going to keep the faith in my own intuition and keep hope alive.