We had our meeting with our specialist on Tuesday which went okay.
At the beginning of the meeting they were hesitant about me cycling again considering my emotional state after the last cycle, but I have honestly bounced back really well, and feel 100% on where I was at that point. They could see that as well and so are happy for us to attempt one more IVF cycle before the year - hopefully lucky cycle number ten.
We went through what happened last cycle, and our embryologist explained that the female (egg) DNA is what gets the embryo to develop up to day 3, which is when the male dna takes over and gets the embryo to day 5. If you have plenty of embryos at day 3 but they fail to develop to day 5, it means your sperm is kaput. While you can still fall pregnant with high sperm DNA damage, the combination of him also having no motility means that the clinic would prefer us to move to donor sperm. Unfortunately donor sperm in Australia is incredibly hard to come by - very few sperm banks and they are only for their clinics use, there is a 5 family limit on donors and a long quarantine and cooling off period. There is no way we could fit another cycle in this year with donor sperm so we are going to roll the dice and try one last cycle with Murrays sperm. I can't quite let go yet, after all his sperm was good enough to get us pregnant one - plus the chemical pregnancy last December. Two out of our five transfers, something happened - I still think those are good odds, even if we havent necessarily made it to transfer in a lot of the cycles.
So at this point I am going to cycle in November, but we are still progressing our adoption seminars which are at the end of October, and are going to start advertising in the papers and on the internet to hopefully find someone who is willing to help us by donating sperm, in the event that this cycle is unsuccessful and we need to go again next year.
They are really happy with my egg production, so we are going to stick with the same FSH dose, although if I want it turned down one notch, they are also happy with that (to hopefully avoid ohss).
I can see how you're not ready to "give up". You feel like you need to try again and the money Murray won, is allowing you to do that. It's like it was just meant to be. Sending you so much good JUJU for your cycle!
ReplyDelete*HUGS*
Hugs today, must have been hard for you and Murray to hear such a dx about his wee sperm, but, I am really glad you guys will have another chance to do another cycle (speeking as someon who was told that my eggs may be an issue -it's hard to give up on them).
ReplyDeleteThere are some things that we can all do to improve things, sperm and eggs take 3 months to deveop, which means you guys have enough time if you want to invest into investigating what can be done to improve the gametes :). I did this and had a better egg response, but as I am in the 2ww we wont know if it made a lasting difference.