WTF Summary

Our WTF appointment for our first failed IVF cycle was supposed to be March 10th, but the clinic called yesterday saying that they had some cancellations and asked if we wanted to go in yesterday morning instead. Of course we did.

We got there at 9:30 and had to wait over an hour to see the doctor (good start). Once we finally got to see him, he went over the details of the cycle. We looked over my follie growth, SA, egg count and quality, fertilization rate, and embryo quality. Dr. M said that almost everything looked great. He was happy with my response to the protocol and meds we used. He said that it was hard for him to decide if I should trigger on day 9 of stims or go for one more day (we triggered on day 9), but he was happy with the results. I had an AFC of 16, 12 eggs were retrieved, 10 were mature, and 9 fertilized normally. I am really happy with that too. He told us that since Seth's sample was great and we had a great fertilization rate, it's probably safe to say that my egg quality is okay. His main concern is embryo quality.

Of the 9 that fertilized, there were 4-5 that looked great on day 3 and 2-3 that looked okay. One of them was clearly abnormal. They made the decision to postpone transfer until day 5. All was still great. However, between days 3 and 5 things went downhill. We only had one good quality blastocyst on day 5 (the 3BB embryo that we transferred). 3 of the others made it to the early blastocyst stage, but the others were not growing properly. Even though they prefer to freeze day 5 embryos, they waited until day 6 to see if the 3 early blasts caught up but they never did. So out of 9 fertilized eggs, we had one blastocysts.

Dr. M said that it's possible that it was just bad luck. Maybe next time will be better. However, he wants to talk to the embryologist to see what she thinks. He wants to see if she has any ideas about why things went to shit after day 3 or if there's anything that we could do differently. He made a note to talk with her and then he said he would call me next week. (Why the fuck did they reschedule my appointment if he wasn't ready to see us yet? It's so frustrating that we spent so much time and H had to cancel a meeting just to hear 'sorry, we'll know more next week when we were supposed to see you anyway'. More waiting - yay!)

We're also going to do some karyotype/chromosome testing and check me for clotting disorders. He thinks these tests are a little excessive (usually he would do them for someone with recurrent miscarriages) but since everything else looks good he figures it is worth checking it out before we try again.

Overall, I guess I'm glad that most things looked okay. Hopefully that means we just had bad luck this time. Or maybe the embryologist will have something to offer that will give us a better shot next time. We're almost 100% sure that we want to start prepping for round 2 when my next cycle starts. In the mean time, we have a consult with another clinic in two weeks and I'm really glad that we decided to get a second opinion.