Follow up appointment

Matt and I met with Dr. H this morning as a follow up to our failed IVF cycle.  The first thing we discussed was how I magically ended up with 46 eggs and how that could have effected things.  Even up to my trigger day I was only showing 15 or so eggs in the ultrasound.  But I guess my estrogen shot up to over 6000 that day, which was not really good.  So change #1 would be to not use as high doses of stims as we wouldn't want to sacrifice quality for quantity of eggs. Also the high estrogen could have made it harder for implantation.

After the retrieval, everything still looked great and I had the 18 fertilized eggs.  They were growing wonderfully until around day 3 after the retrieval.  Dr. H is thinking that maybe the growth slowed because the embryos weren't responding well to the culture environment in the lab.  Looking back she thinks it would have been better to do a day 3 transfer and have the embryos back in me sooner.  Change #2 would be to do a day 3 transfer regardless of the number of eggs to get the embryos back to the natural environment. 

When it comes to our 3 frozen embryos, Dr. H actually suggested we tried using those first (as long as my insurance wouldn't count a frozen transfer as one of our 3 IVF procedures).  A frozen embryo transfer would require a lot less monitoring and I wouldn't have to do any stims.  Taking out the stims removes the spike in estrogen, which could have made a difference.  I showed Dr. H my lovely reaction from the progesterone oil and it was noted that I can't take that (no matter which route we take) and I will probably go on a progesterone suppository.  She had no doubt that we could be successful and said that many couples who use frozen embryos are successful once the stimming is removed. 

So we are tentatively planning on moving forward with the frozen embryo transfer in October.  I wanted to get through the first bit of school before doing anything.  If our insurance company counts this as one of our IVF cycles in coverage, we would rather do a fresh cycle and save the frozen embryos.  Dr. H was going to have someone on staff get ahold of our insurance company ASAP so we can figure out which route to take and get moving forward.