IF Testing & Treatment w/o 4.12

optimistgardener

@kiki047 just last night while grazing the internets for new info on the experiences of one-ovaried women like me doing IVF, I read somewhere that the left ovary is often the "lazy" ovary, while the right is usually the diligently productive one! As a left-handed person I immediately wondered if the opposite is true for left-handed women. For whatever it is worth, the studies seem to suggest that having only one ovary does not appreciably change IVF outcomes, although retrieval numbers are usually less impressive. I don't think it's unreasonable to extend this logic to your situation of having one accessible ovary.

acleverusername

@optimistgardener @kiki047 interesting about the "left ovary" being the lazy one! this has repeatedly been the case for me (I've only had 2 instances where my AFC on the left was higher than the right, and I've probably had 8-10 AFC scans by now.) During my ER, my right ovary had 11 follicles on it; and left only 4! Hopefully this works in both your favor!

laura-kay

So, I met up with my friend yesterday and we talked a lot about my journey so far.

TW (pregnancy)

She had PCOS and was treated at my doctor, and now has a beautiful 2 month little girl who is also my goddaughter 

I told her I’ve been trying to change my thought process, and to try to have peace and acceptance instead of putting all my energy towards this emotional rollercoaster.  

TW (religion)

I’m trying to change what I pray for...before it was for a child and now I’m wondering if that is the right thing to ask for.  Now I’m trying to pray for a child, but most of all peace, trust and acceptance.

I was talking to a fellow lady who is experiencing IF treatments and she reminded me about Psalm 121...and I saw this scene - so peaceful and makes me think of “from whence comes my help”

She reminded me that it is still ok to be angry and upset and to just let my feelings go instead of bottling it up.  It’s ok to feel that it isn’t fair, and that it just doesn’t make sense, and that we can grieve - and that it is even healthy to let ourselves do that.  

However - at what point do we start to just let things go - still try for some time - but also accept that it may not work?  I’ve started to look up information about some other options. (Question - do I need to trigger warn about adoption discussion?  If so I will edit.). I am searching for information about Home Studies, adoption placement agencies, funding, etc.  Part of me feels like it is needed as a form of acceptance and part of me is feeling like doing that is me giving up.  If we adopted, I would love the child so much and would be so thankful to be able to share love as a parent...but I also would really like to be a parent biologically to a child born of me.

I guess I am rambling now.  I’ve just had all these thoughts going through me lately.  :shrug:

acleverusername

@laura-kay I love everything you’ve said; I sense a kind of release from you. Hopefully going through the motions of looking into other options will give you peace as you continue on your journey to have a child of yourself. 

[Deleted User]

@laura-kay sending you so many ((((hugs)))) I have heard a saying, "you can't bury feelings alive." And I have found that to be true for me.  I have gone through so many stages of grief, anger, resentment, BARGAINING lol at various points in our IF journey, and at no point was I able to make those feelings go away by discounting them, feeling guilty for having them, or pushing them aside.  I have had to feel Everything throughout this process, even when I would absolutely rather not. 😅. You are doing an amazing job walking this path, that none of us asked for... ❤️❤️❤️

kiki047

@optimistgardener that's an interesting tidbit about the left ovary, thank you for sharing! Anecdotally I recall many of the ladies who have passed through here usually having one lazy ovary but never paid much attention to whether it was consistently one side over the other. Also curious whether that would be reversed for anyone who is left-dominant like yourself. 
@laura-kay thank you for sharing some of your thoughts with us you put it so eloquently, and touched on things that I think so many of us have thought about over the years. "At what point do we start to just let things go"... I ask myself that almost daily these days, and sometimes I'm more at peace with letting things just take their course, other times I'm hell-bent on making this happen for us one way or another at whatever cost. We may never have the answers we're searching for, but I hope you're able to allow yourself sink into those feelings and let them guide you where they may. Sending you some extra hugs!! 

AFM, I finally have a tentative retrieval/transfer date. I'm still bleeding quite heavily on CD12 despite being on BCP so I've been instructed to double up on the pill and see if that does anything. But I'm going to send out an SOS soon, I feel like I've been possessed by the devil himself this week. My irritability levels are off the charts and I feel the stress squeezing me like a corset. Thank god it's almost Friday. I stop BCP Sat April 24th, start lupron the same day, then go for my baseline monitoring Monday Apr 26th and will start stims then. Tentative ER somewhere around May 8th with fresh transfer to follow 5 days later. 

bumblebee0210

@kiki047. Sorry you're feeling crappy on the pill, but exciting to have a date! I am such a planner, one of the things that drives me nuts about IVF is the lack of concrete timing!

@laura-kay I'm so sorry you're going through this, and it's really good to take time to feel and process your feelings. I have definitely felt that same 

In defense of left ovaries.... mine was actually outperforming the right at today's u/s. I *think* the leftover follicles are gone so these are real numbers, but I'm trying not to bank on them since they are better than last time at this point: I have 2 13-ish and 5 littles on the left, and 4 littles and one ~13 on the right. I will double check with the nurse when she calls this afternoon because it was a little confusing at the scan and I was in a rush to get out of there, but I think it was like 12 or 13 total. Obviously the littles have to grow, but encouraging none the less...

optimistgardener

@bumblebee0210 hurray for your left ovary defying stereotypes! Those sound like promising numbers. Grow little follicles grow.

@kiki047 our calendars are not that far apart from one another. My stims start on May 2nd, with tentative retrieval on the 13th. I'll be following your journey with interest! And re: lazy ovaries, apparently if you only have one, no matter which side it is on it is likely to take on a share of the absent ovary's labor.

kiki047

@optimistgardener happy to have a cycle buddy through all of this! Do you mind me asking, do you always use a different donor for each of your IUIs/now IVF? You mentioned you used a known donor for your natural cycles but otherwise do you have a criteria for selecting donors? Curious how that all works. 
*side note, dunno if this requires a TW: MH was doing IVF with his previous wife who had a DOR dx, so they were going with an egg donor. He showed me some of the profiles (this was before we were together, we've been acquaintances for a long time) and it was wild to just flip through what was basically a gene pool catalogue for his future child. In the end that was the straw that broke the camel's back when he realized he didn't actually want kids with her, but the discussion has come up a few times about what we would do if we needed an egg or sperm donor and how we would choose one. 

bumblebee0210

Update: I got actual numbers from the nurse on the phone, and the left ovary had one 13, one 11.5, and 5<10, and the right ovary had one 10, one 10.5, and 4<10, so 13 total including the littles. So the left ovary was winning, but by less than I had thought. *BUT* my e2 was only 241... womp womp. So they are upping my follistim again. Hoping those littles will grow and it will be much higher by Saturday...

kiki047

@bumblebee0210 ahh FX those littles get a move on and the increased Follistim will bump your E2 to get you where you need to be. How are you feeling otherwise? Any better/worse than the first time around? 

bumblebee0210

@kiki047 Honestly I feel fine (and I did last time too). I didn't start to feel uncomfortable until after the trigger last time. I guess it's a good side effect of DOR?

inthewoods23

@bumblebee0210
Obligatory Jurassic Park follicle motivation

Need some cheering on? I'm your gal! Lol

acleverusername

@bumblebee0210 I have a good feeling that those little a will catch up! Like @kiki047 said, the higher Follistim dose should do the trick. And how that you’re on Ganerelix, you could still for longer until they get there. 

bumblebee0210

@inthewoods23.  I would have been sad without the jurassic park meme...
@acleverusername. Yes! last time I went 12 days on stims but eventually my e2 got up to 1900, so I am hopeful!

acleverusername

Also, @kiki047 @optimistgardener
I'm getting major FOMO over here because I may not have a cycle buddy! I don't think I'll be starting stims until mid-to-late May. 

optimistgardener

Hey @kiki047, I don't mind talking about it at all! As a real brief backdrop for all of this, I always told myself that if I hadn't found a forever partner by the time I was 35, I'd just find a sperm donor and be a single mom. And so it transpired (at least the being single and old thing). I'm spoilering the remainder in the likelihood that it proves long and boring (sorry, some editing):

After I asked around to a few of my friends who I hoped might be willing to serve as donors, and those conversations went pretty awkwardly, I opted to go the anonymous route at first. I decided to use the Sperm Bank of California, both because they have a long history of welcoming non-traditional parenting arrangements, and because they were based a mile from me when I first started trying, which meant I could bike down to their office and pick up their frozen canister on my bicycle. They are also great about providing a really lively and insightful donor profile. While most places seemed to provide basic genetic information (eye color, ethnic background, basic physical description) as well as maybe a short paragraph with the donor's anonymized summary bio, the SBCA has a long-form essay even on their shorter free profiles. It describes how the donor came across in his interview, how he carried himself, his style choices, his interests as a kid, how he got along (or didn't) with his family, why he decided to be a donor, his favorite books and music and other interests and goals in life, etc. For some reason I found it really helpful to be able to "meet" the donors in this way. I of course care whether the donor I use is basically healthy and doesn't carry any serious genetic diseases, but I am way more swayed in my donor search by learning that someone was an obsessive book reader as a kid or loved exploring in nature than I am if they have perfect eyesight and a high-falootin' job. I would rather my kid share genetics with someone who seems like a genuine, sweet person than someone who may be a marvelous physical specimen and neurosurgeon but is an egotistical jerk. All the donors who say they donated because they think their genetics deserve to be spread far and wide get an immediate hard pass from me. So for that reason, I really liked the SBCA's approach. Other banks I've looked at do not provide nearly as much detail about the characters of their donors.

For the great majority of my TTC cycles (starting IVI, moving on to natural IUI, and then increasingly medicated IUIs), I have used frozen donor sperm. I have had to use new donors for probably about half of my purchases from them, mainly because a donor's stock will often run out quickly, and because I have always purchased only 1 vial at a time in the fruitless hope that it would be the last time I ever had to make a purchase. At first I would spend ages trying to find the "perfect" donor, but as time wore on, I became more cavalier about the process. Mainly if they seem like nice guys, have existing pregnancies, and don't record any especially gnarly family cancer history, I am fine with it.

After I moved from California to Oregon, and after my TTC journey began to seem disconcertingly lengthy, I began again trying to find a person I knew who I trusted to be a known donor. That person wound up being a friend of mine who lives here in Oregon, someone who I briefly dated once but who wound up being a better friend, who I've known for a number of years. He already has a kid, and so he knows what it feels like to be a dad, and how he would likely react to having more progeny out and about in the world. We talked about what it would mean if I got pregnant, and we agreed that he would have a role in the kid's life to some extent, a sort of "uncle-ish" figure, but that I would be the decision-maker and have sole custody. We agreed that if a pregnancy took place, we would get legal paperwork signed to ensure that that was all set in stone. We've had a few cycles of trying this way, especially after the local women's clinic in Medford washed their hands of my sorry infertile case and before I started working with the fertility clinic in Eugene. However I continue to mainly rely on the sperm bank, especially now that I've started doing the more serious stuff, for a few reasons: 1) I don't know what his sperm quality is and I am not really interested in the rabbithole of getting him tested. What if it turns out to be low quality? I know that he's not the healthiest dude in terms of his personal habits and I am in no position to ask him to stop drinking/smoking/eating crap; 2) I already have enough problems with my own body and trying to get pregnant, so I might as well make sure that the sperm side of things is guaranteed to be the A+++ grade stuff that I pay the sperm bank the big bucks for; 3) Now that I am getting treatment in Eugene, I can't ask him to drop everything according to the whims of my cycle and drive up to Eugene to provide a fresh donation as needed. However he remains willing to hop in in case a cycle goes awry as a "backup." Like I said, cool dude.

optimistgardener

@acleverusername aww shucks! Well I'm sure I'll still be haunting the board and more than happy to commiserate/freak out/get excited along with you anyhow!

acleverusername

@optimistgardener your donor friend does in fact sound like a cool dude. Glad you have someone like that in your corner, especially after the earlier awkward convos. 

quiltandknit

Just popping in to say hi. I haven’t been participating much because I don’t really have anything to contribute other than love and support! And also can’t keep up with properly tagging and responding. You guys are all miles ahead of us with so much knowledge! I feel very basic and simple by comparison.

A quick update: I’m getting ready for my 3rd IUI in the next couple days. Trying not to feel pressure on this cycle, but if it doesn’t work, I think we need to talk about IVF. My RE said 3-4 cycles but I’m feeling kind of meh about this one so I’m not too excited about possibly doing a 4th. However, I am getting pretty uncomfortable the past couple of days so hoping this means I am getting more than one egg. 

Will be stalking and loving on you guys...and definitely back with lots of questions if we do end up needing IVF.

bumblebee0210

@quiltandknit. Good luck!  Hopefully you won't need it, but this group is great if you have any questions. One thing that may be productive to focus on now is supplements for you and YH/partner, since they often recommend being on them for 3 months prior to ER.  Do you have a dx? I don't remember. But CoQ10 is good for everyone, and various antioxidant supplements (Vit C/ Vit E/ NAC). These are all good for both partners to take. And then there are specific things with PCOS, DOR, Age, etc. 

@acleverusername. Don't worry-- I will still be stimming then! I can be everyone's cycle buddy

optimistgardener

@quiltandknit heeeey from a fellow knitter. I wish i could claim to quilt as well, but I can barely operate a sewing machine, so.

I can see from a few weeks ago that you were doing some progesterone support for a short luteal phase. Did it seem to help? Are you doing any other meds to help with follicle growth? Sorry if you talked about that already and I just missed it.

Lisa3379

@quiltandknit Good luck with the IUI! I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for you. 

acleverusername

@quiltandknit Good luck with the IUI! I totally support what @bumblebee0210 had said re: supplements. If IVF is possible, it's good to start taking them sooner rather than later. If MFI is an issue, hit me up for supplement recommendations for men. I've got a good list. 

@bumblebee0210 LOL @ being everyone's cycle buddy. 🤣🤣🤣 Hopefully that's not true, but the possible support is much appreciated. 

bumblebee0210

@acleverusername. You all will be back here TFAS, and I'll be like "cycle 248! They upped my follistim to 5,000!"

acleverusername

@bumblebee0210 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Imagine Follistim of 5000IU!? FML. I don't know if to laugh or cry. 

keikilove

Happy Friday, everyone! Like @quiltandknit, I’ve been MIA and not able to keep up with tags lately. But I’ve been lurking this busy board here and there when I can. (I have two work contracts that started last week & this week, plus my 2 regular jobs so no rest for the weary. Except that yesterday was DH’s birthday, so I did make sure to take time to celebrate him.🎈) Also been battling with insurance about some crazy mistakes=fun times. Just a few quick tags, maybe back for more over the weekend. 

@quiltandknit Good luck with the IUI! FX that’s all you need. 

@optimistgardener Your friend sounds like a great person to have this sperm donor arrangement set up with. Could you have his sperm frozen for future use? Even if you don’t want to have it tested, I believe you could still have it frozen at your clinic. (They do this for husbands all the time despite their sperm quality.) Maybe something to consider the next time he is in your neck of the woods. 

@acleverusername Glad to hear that you’re feeling so good about your next steps with the new RE! We *may* be cycle buddies in May, we are considering one more round of DuoStim maybe. Depends on finances. 

@Kiki047 Feeling so hopeful for you!!!💗💗💗

@bumblebee0210 I’m so late, but congrats on your healthy embryo! That is such a relief and so exciting!!! Hopefully your stimming won’t go on too much longer.😆

acleverusername

There you are @keikilove! 

laura-kay

Btw thank you everyone for your hugs and thoughts and responses!  I’m a bit late in the reply but I appreciate it very much

acleverusername

@bumblebee0210 anxiously awaiting your update!

bumblebee0210

AFM: follies are growing— I now have 8 between 10 and 16mms plus maybe 7 or 8 more littles, but E2 is still pretty low at 540. It is doubling every 2 days but it just started low. It’s hard to compare to last cycle because I had a giant lead follicle that was pumping out estrogen and kind of artificially inflating my E2 numbers I think. But I def have more follicles this time so hopefully they will keep growing! Today is stim day 9, I’m guessing trigger will be Tuesday or maybe Wednesday at the latest. 

quiltandknit

@bumblebee0210 sorry I should have used the template on the first post to give you all the info. We are unexplained. No male factor, actually his counts are pretty high post-wash. Last IUI we had 16M. So the problem
is likely with me, we just don’t know where. I have been taking clomid 50mg for these three cycles, and I do ovulate on it but only get one follicle. Last cycle we added Crinone gel 2dpiui which didn’t make us ultimately successful, but did delay my period so I think that’s good. I asked about med changes for this one knowing it might be our last, but my RE thinks we should stick with this since my first cycle was a CP, it almost worked.

As for supplements, I’m taking coq10, DHEA, omega 3s, NAC, vit E, and alpha-lipoid acid to hopefully help with egg quality. The Coq10 and DHEA I’ve been taking for 2 months, but the others just started with this cycle. DH is not taking anything ATM.

I’m still waiting for this IUI. Definitely feel things happening, I’m bloated and uncomfortable, but im surprised my opks haven’t turned positive. So I’m heading in bright and early for ultrasound and blood work to see what’s going on in there.

optimistgardener

hey @quiltandknit! I hope the opk comes back positive soon or that you learn something useful in the ultrasound/bloodwork. I was on clomid for one one month--it thinned my lining and my follicle also did not respond well to it. I only got one, and it ruptured small and early. For that reason my old clinic hustled me along to femara for my next few cycles. Make sure you have them check in on your lining!

bows22

I was out of town this week for work and then came down with a wicked cold (got a covid test Friday and am waiting for the results) but have been following everyone else’s updates!

@acleverusername that’s great that you found a doctor to go with! I assume TEW has some familiarity with him since they are in the same area? If so I’m sure that makes you feel more comfortable! To answer your questions, yes I am considering changing to go on my firm’s insurance. There are some more factors I have to consider but I will most likely do it. And I’m not sure on the repeat SA. If they think we should do it DH will definitely be on board but they had zero concerns with his first one because his motile count was so high so I don’t know if they will want it. 

@[email protected] I’m with you on the “basic and simple” side! Just want you to know you’re not alone haha 

keikilove

Ok, just saw this, had to share.😆😭

quiltandknit

@optimistgardener sorry the clomid didn’t work out well. I have heard it can thin the lining and cause some smaller follicles. It always makes me nervous for IUI day because I don't usually go to the clinic for monitoring, they just have me use opks at home. Unless I’m ovulating later like this cycle, then they check in to see how close I might be. Thankfully this is cycle #3 for me on clomid, and my u/s today showed a nice thick lining at 15.78mm and my dominant follicle at 23mm. Blood work confirmed my LH surge today so the IUI is tomorrow (finally)!

@bows22 glad I’m not the only one basic and simple! I feel so not helpful around here because I just don’t have the knowledge that others do.

[Deleted User]

@keikilove
<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/5020794/uploads/editor/bm/dppslc9d3izt.gif" alt="">

acleverusername

@keikilove I'm dying... 

@quiltandknit Yay for IUI! And holy cow I'm jealous of that lining! @optimistgardener I also had issues with thinning lining on Clomid so I'm not allowed to use it any more. (Or rather, I won't allow a doctor to use it on me any more.)