Second and Final

With the news of our negative beta, I shed a couple of tears, but to be honest, I felt like I already knew it was negative. We had a 50/50 chance, and unfortunately, it was not in our favor this time.

It was still tough to hear that voicemail.
We prepared ourselves as best we could.
After getting so many negative tests throughout the week, my heart just wasn't filled with much hope.
Maybe I already knew, in a way....to shield my heart as best I could.

I had already put the wheels in motion for our back-up plan, the day before my blood results.

And I'm about to get real honest....about our PGD results, about everything.
At first I felt an overwhelming need to protect our results, because I know that not everyone may have agreed with our route, or our choices, especially since some of those people are closer to us than others.

Here we are trying to nurture a potential life, and we kept getting bombarded with questions about the "other embryos"....and what our plans were for them.
Like it really mattered at that point or at any point in the future.

After going through the ringer for an ENTIRE YEAR with IVF, and battling this disease called Infertility for an additional THREE. YEARS. PRIOR we have hardened my edges and grown accustomed to shitty news, shitty results, and absolutely positively know when to keep things to ourselves.

But I do know one thing.
I am never doing this again.
Not that I'm not a strong fucking warrior in the face of uncertainty, but life must move forward at some point and I have dedicated a literal year to being a science project.

I couldn't ever imagine going through another year like this one.
Being prodded and poked on a daily basis.
Shoving hundreds, upon hundreds of needles into my body.
Injecting a lot of meds, that do a lot of fucked up things to my hormones, to my sanity, to my health.
To have professionals tell me I have old eggs.
That I'M broken.
That we may never collect enough embryos for testing.

Yes, we got over each and every hurdle.
Barely.

See, after we collected a "whopping" five embryos that developed into Day-5 blastocysts, we had them tested for our genetic match (MCAD) along with general chromosomal abnormalities.

And you wanna know what we were left with?

Two.

I went through Hell and back to harvest as many eggs as my body would give me.
After all three retrievals, I yielded 29 total eggs, of which 15 of them fertilized normally, and five grew to be blastocysts.
Of those five, only two embryos were genetically normal.

So the answer to what we will be doing with our "extra" embryos?

Nothing. Because we don't have any.

See, when we got the results of our final two, I was ELATED to even have the option to move forward.
But my next thought was, because we already decided, in stone, that we would be a one-child family, we were at a cross-roads.

What if the first one took and we had this extra embryo?

You see, Mark and I already signed on the dotted line to discard any extras.
And I must reiterate....that what I just wrote is OUR decision.

We did not want to donate and potentially see a product of both of us in the world.
We did not want to donate to science.
So the only other option was to discard.

I DARE anyone to come at me with their opinions on this. 
It's our choice and our life and yada yada ya. So peace out nay-sayers.

Anyways, even though we chose to discard, we both felt guilty, in a way.
Guilty that we might not be able to give a perfectly normal embryo a chance should the first one take.

The two embryos that made it were vastly different.

We had one Grade 5BB Blastocyst make it from our third retrieval.
This one grew slowly, and didn't make it to a "5" until Day 7. Two days late.
But it made it, and looked good.

The other one was the hatching Grade 6BB Blastocysts from our second retrieval.
You remember, the only one that made it?
This one grew according to a normal timeline, making to a hatching blast on Day 6.

I had asked if the embryologist could give us a recommendation, even though I already knew they would tell us to go with the 6BB.
And they did.

But we went against our better judgement, and the embryologists suggestion, and decided to give the 5BB a chance first.
This one was our guilt trip. The one we felt needed a chance, but may never get it.

Well....we all know what happened.
It was negative.
The whole transfer, and time before, and time after....seemed wrong for some reason.
My gut told me this one wouldn't work from the start.

I had questions about the transfer process, but kept quiet.
I never felt anything at any point that indicated I was pregnant, even the day of beta, when you would normally test positive, I still felt nothing.

But....being able to close the guilt chapter gave us both huge relief.
We now focus on the front-runner.
Our last shot.

We know the process, we are now transfer veterans.
I have questioned a few things from our first transfer, and pushed to have an endo scratch completed with this one.
Normally our doctor doesn't do the scratch until two failed attempts.
Well, we don't have that many.
So I got the ok and we will move forward.

I have higher hopes with this one.
The one that will make me a mom.

I am also finding peace knowing that no matter what our results with the second and final attempt, we will closing this chapter of specialists and IVF by the New Year.

If it works, I will have my final appointment with the specialist, and take my final shot, all within 2016.

And if it doesn't, we can't say we didn't give it the old college try.
We are at peace knowing we have done EVERYTHING in our power to make us parents.

So thank you.
Thank you for your kind words as we keep shuffling through this process.
I lean on that comfort more than you know.

But we aren't quite finished yet.
The best is yet to come. :)