TW: Positive pregnancy/beta 🤍
I wanted to share this for the person staring at a disappointing follicle count, the person being told to cancel, the person with only one embryo left, or the person whose embryo isn't developing as quickly as the others.
I’m 37 and went into IVF without telling any of my family or friends. Not even my parents know. I have people who love and support me, but I knew all the questions about appointments, follicles, embryos and results would make me more anxious, so I decided to keep this journey private.
I went into IVF with so much hope, but at my second ultrasound I was told my AFC was only 4. Usually whenever I had it checked before, it was around 10. Then over the next few ultrasounds, we found out that only 2 follicles were really responding.
I spoke with few doctors from my clinix and they talked to me about cancelling the IVF cycle and turning it into an IUI because they weren’t very hopeful about the outcome.
I decided to continue anyway. I’m very fortunate to have really good coverage, so I told myself that even if nothing came out of this cycle, I could at least learn how my body responds and use that information if I had to do another cycle.
Going into retrieval, I was so nervous. I kept thinking, what if those 2 follicles are empty and we get nothing? After retrieval, the embryologist came to me and said they actually got 5 eggs and they couldn’t believe it. 4 were mature and all 4 fertilized. All 4 were still growing on day 3.
At that point, we had 3 that were doing really well and one that was quite a bit slower (I was told they don't think this one will grow further). Then by day 5, the 3 that we thought were the good ones had stopped growing. Somehow, the little slow one kept going. It made it to morula on day 4 and then became an early blastocyst, graded 2AB, and that is the embryo we transferred.
It feels like the odds were against us at almost every step. I had also never seen a positive pregnancy test in my life. After dealing with infertility for so long, I had started wondering if my body was even capable of getting pregnant.
But today, somehow, I am 4 weeks 5 days pregnant. 🥹 My first beta was 253 and my second was 601.I know I’m still very early. I don’t know what happens from here and I’m still nervous about every next step. Give your body a chance. Give that little embryo a chance. Try not to compare your numbers with everyone else because your story can be completely different.
You really just never know when you might be the lucky one. Even after everything infertility has put me through, I still somehow feel incredibly lucky.
I keep thinking that maybe I didn’t choose this embryo.
Maybe this little embryo chose me. 🤍