FET scheduled

Wednesday 9/4 @ 11am Nemo gets in mah belly where s/he will hopefully decide to get comfy until May of next year.  I had my 1st acupuncture appt 2 days ago to prep.  Very cool & very pricey but hopefully worth it.  I go in again for before & after the transfer.  Yesterday I also started PIO ass shots & Endometin vaginal suppositories.  Fun, hormonal times!

Sprem frag test results

 

Vid is home from India! And we have the results of his sperm frag test. They look @ 3 parameters: DNA integrity (fragmentation), the level of immature sperm (decondensed DNA) & damage from free radicals (oxidation). The 1st 2 he passed with flying colors. The last one he was in the border region. So, he will talk with the RE about antioxident supplements which may (or may not) help. While it's great he's not horribly MFI (his morph is low but everything else is ok) it also means we still really don't know WTF our problem is.

I had monitoring this morning & apparently I am about to hyperovulate. Makes sense I guess since there are fraternal twins on both sides of my family. I had 2 follicles @ over 20mm on my R ovary today. Who knows how often this happens?  Tomorrow is CD13 so that makes sense as that's my normal ovulation day. So not only can Vid's guys not manage to fertilize a single egg, but even when there are double the targets we still can't get pregnant!

Also, tomorrow after work I  meet with the accupuncturist for the 1st time to discuss what she will do.  She comes highly recommended & is part of a co-op that does a lot of work with infertility patients.  The plan is for me to see her both immediately before & after transfer, assuming Nemo thaws out ok & reanimates.

Sharing in someone's joy for a change.

I know I spend a lot of time on this blog either being depressed, bitchy, or crazy (as infertility tends to do to people) but today, I have a nice infertility-related post to share!  Below is a local news story from Ohio about one of my infertile interwebs buddies who recently adopted a baby girl with the help of Facebook.  Kristen & John endured over 8 years of TTC with multiple treatment failures personally as well as with a gestational carrier & using donor embryos.  They are such a cute little family & I just had to share:

I *heart* Jimmy Fallon & you should too!

Yay for celebs who are open about their infertility struggles, even if it's after the fact!  And double yay for a male celeb talking about it!

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

My only complaint: not everyone "gets there" in the end.  I truly wish we all did, but unfortunately miracles don't happen for everyone.

Anticipation

The hubs is en route to India as I type this.  I dropped him off @ Logan Airport earlier today. He'll be back in 2 weeks.  Not long @ all.  We've done this several times before.  Still, it's so quiet without him home.  On the plus side my house is clean & will remain so until the 27th.

No news yet on the sperm frag test.

I had my thyroid recheck last week as it's been a year since the last one.  My TSH is up to 2.1.  My RE likes to see it between 1 & 2 so of course my body would be all "Let's fuck with 'em!" & be right on the border.  So, she kicked me up to the next dosage & we'll retest in a few weeks.

Also in a few weeks?  Our FET.  Aunt Flo will likely be here Thursday or Friday which would put the transfer around Labor Day.  Hopefully my TSH is better by then.  I doubt she'd cancel me based on a 2.1 but @ this point I am all but convinced something will go wrong.  Will Nemo not survive the thaw?  Will my lining be out of sync?  Will blood rain from the sky or a plague of locusts descend upon us?  

Maybe all of the above.

Sperm frag test: check!

Vid had his sperm frag test done this morning.  I came home from work & he informed me since the last time he had to give a sample they've updated their DVD collection.  An amusing quip but also sad as it shows how long we've been in this game: they've had to rotate the porn.

While it would be nice to get an answer to our baby making issues, I am equally scared this will give us no clue @ all.  And if this does show there's more of an issue with his 'boys' than we originally thought, how will he handle it?  Furthermore, what (if anything) could be done to overcome said issue?  We should have results in a week or 2.

No fat chicks! Oh, wait...

Last year, I posted about the fact women who were told they could lose weight & magically get pregnant on their own after gastric bypass surgery actually didn't.  Another study appears to back up the claim that obesity does not reduce chances of IVF success:

"For the study, researchers looked at data of patients from five earlier studies (of women using their own eggs for IVF) conducted over the past decade along with data from 123 egg donor recipients from the Washington University Infertility and Reproductive Medicine Center...Most IVF programs have certain BMI restrictions in order to analyze whether a woman is fit to receive the treatment. According to Jungheim, these restrictions need to be re-examined as according to her, there is still a lot to learn about the obesity-pregnancy link... "We need to find out what specifically goes wrong in obese women who don't [get pregnant]. We think other factors besides BMI are involved."

Yes!  Other factors, like environmental ones, such as linking BPA (commonly found in plastics) to infertility, finding it may disrupt eggs from maturing properly:

"...exposed more than 350 immature eggs, which were left over from infertility procedures, to varying amounts of BPA in lab dishes. Only 35 percent of eggs exposed to the lowest levels of BPA had a normal number and configuration of chromosomes after they fully matured compared with 71 percent of those in a control group of eggs that weren’t exposed to BPA...Most of the eggs exposed to the highest levels of BPA failed to mature at all, and the rest had abnormal chromosomes."

  

Clearly more research on the causes of IF is needed.