Introduction

Over the last several years, I have often thought about blogging our infertility journey. I just never seemed to get around to it. Partly because I always thought our journey must surely be over soon, but mostly because I just couldn't decide whether it would be helpful or not. I still don't know, but I have decided to give it a try.

Our journey started over 5 years ago when I was 34.4 years old. I will spare the details, but perhaps will share more of the day to day journey in future blogs. In a nutshell, after 6 months of trying to conceive I knew something was wrong. Yes, they say it takes a year of unprotected sex to call it "infertility" (unless you are over 35 . . . and I wasn't 35 yet), but I had been taking my basal body temperature (BBT) and knew we were "hitting the window". I knew something was wrong, but I just couldn't bring myself to face it.

It took 1.5 years to finally get a diagnosis. We were dealing with male factor infertility. The only treatment was to do IVF with ICSI. I just couldn't bring myself to do it, even though our odds were slim to none in conceiving without it. Hubby is an incurable optimist, so he agreed.

On our second IUI, we conceived Ernest with only 400,000 post wash motile sperm. For those of you unfamiliar with MFI, this is nothing short of a miracle. Many studies don't even look at IUI with less than 1 million post wash motile sperm and most put the cut off at 5 million total motile sperm.

25 weeks later (27 weeks pregnant) we experienced our second miracle. With only a 1% chance of loss in the third trimester, I went into preterm labor and our son died shortly after birth due to a likely non inherited genetic mistake. His chromosomes were normal and the geneticists told us it was just plain bad luck.

But we got pregnant on the second IUI so at least we knew that would work for us, right? Wrong. We tried month after month, but finally had to face facts. We made an appointment with the RE just over one year after we lost our son and 3.5 years after we started TTC.

We did our first IVF when I was two weeks past my 38th birthday. We got 6 embryos and transferred two on day 6. We got a low beta two weeks later, but it kept rising so we were trying to be hopeful. 6 week diagnosis: blighted ovum.

IVF #2: 38.5 years old, 8 embryos, put 3 back on day 6, low beta, doubled nicely, h/b at 6 weeks 6 days. At 10 weeks the baby had already died.

IVF #3: 39.1 years old, 8 embryos, put 6 back on day 3 with 1/2 fertilized with donor sperm as an experiment. Negative pregnancy test

IVF #4: 39.4 years old, 14 embryos, only 1 looked good for a day 6 transfer, put back all 6 that were still alive. Chemical pregnancy

Latest advice from RE: Move on to donor eggs