I could win an award!

I am just a wonderful pessimist. I have already scheduled my IVF follow meeting, or more affectionately called the WTF meeting. I have been thinking about how I am going to get through the third anniversary of Ernest's birth, the holidays and my 40th birthday. I wonder if I will still be able to be a local advocate for infertility if we give up and choose to live child free. Should I give away the baby blankets I have crocheted? Should we repaint the spare bedroom a less perky kid-friendly color?

All of this the day before we do the transfer and 9 days before the first scheduled beta. I am that good.

The rest of this post is pretty much a "poor me" vent. I encourage you to jump to the blue, italicized portion below to read what I had originally intended to communicate.

I didn't used to be that way. Oh, I have always been a pessimist in general, but I used to think IVF would work for us. The first IVF I knew it would. When it resulted in a blighted ovum, my RE said that, "people who have something happen usually go on to have a good pregnancy." That was all the proof I needed that IVF #2 would absolutely work. We had more and better eggs and embryos. In fact, that was the only cycle where we had an expanded blast on day 5. And we got pregnant. We had a h/b. Then we miscarried. When that one didn't work, we pulled out all the stops. For IVF #3 we transfered 6 day 3 embryos that were all grade 1 or high grade 2. I was so sure it was going to work, I told Brad the night before beta to not be nervous. We were not only pregnant, but this baby would go to term. It was a BFN and that was the beginning of the end for me.

IVF #4 was a Hail-Mary-last-chance-with-my-eggs cycle. I wasn't very hopeful, but every hurdle along the way looked good - lots of antral follicles, 20 eggs!, 14 grade 1 3-day embryos! I went from feeling pretty neutral about the whole thing to getting excited it might actually work. With the day 5 update came bad news. Then we only transferred 1 embryo on day 6 that had a prayer of surviving. I grieved the entire week between transfer and beta for the cycle that hadn't failed yet. It did, of course - not that grieving for a week prior to the failure really helped.

Which brings me to this cycle. I thought it would only bring grief in terms of the loss of a genetic connection. I thought the rest of it would be encouraging. Now it feels so much like the other cycles that I am afraid to hope. Logically, I can tell myself that my good looking embryos could still have been aneuploid. This set of embryos could perform better even if they look the same. I just don't have any proof either that my eggs are mostly aneoploid (no PGD, embryo karyotypes were normal female) or that these will do better in the womb even if they don't look better in the dish. I have nothing substantial to build hope around. Maybe tomorrow will bring better news. In the meantime I am going to try to stay neutral. I don't want to spend the next 8 days crying like I did the last cycle. Maybe I will even be able to cultivate a little hope.

This was a much longer post than I intended. I really just meant to say thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone for holding out hope for this cycle when I haven't been able to. I feel like you are carrying me through this. I appreciate it so much. Maybe, just maybe, you will get to say, "I told you so!" in about 9 months.