Day 6: FOUR FROSTIES

We have FOUR frozen embryos!!! FOUR potentially healthy embryos that could grow into four potential babies! The two early blastocysts from yesterday continued to grow beautifully overnight and they were able to biopsy and freeze them this morning.

Original Photo came from here

I am so over the moon! The doctor said I responded so well that you can barely tell I'm a DOR/FXPOI patient :D It took a whoooole lot of meds, but it will be so, so worth it if these embryos are healthy. I need good chromosomes without Fragile X or trisomy problems.

Our breakdown for our first IVF cycle:

• 12 days of BCPs
• 3 days off
• 11.5 days of 600iu Menopur, 0.83mg Omnitrope, 1mg dexamethasone, 5 days of Cetrotide
• Novarel trigger - 10,000 HCG 

 This protocol resulted in:

• 14 follies
• 11 eggs retrieved
• 8 mature eggs fertilized
• 6 embryos
• 4 frozen day 5/6

My mild OHSS symptoms are starting to resolve today as well. I still got up to pee three times last night, but I think the swelling in my abdomen has gone down a little this morning which means the HCG must finally be leaving my system, I didn't test out the trigger since there was no reason but it would have been interesting to see how long it sticks around. Maybe I'll test it out next cycle to see if it really takes 10 days to get rid of it. The horrible acid reflux is also starting to go down, I don't feel like I'm going to throw up stomach acid, which is awesome. I know I got off a lot easier than many people do  so I'm not complaining.

Now, we need to do the whole thing alllll over again. The big question is, do we take a month off or start right back up with this upcoming period? I've been looking into it and research has shown there's a definite synergistic effect in back to back cycles, especially in really low AMH/DOR/Advanced maternal age patients.  The cumulative effect of both cycles ends up being greater than the sum of both cycles - if the med effect from cycle one is 2 and the med effect from cycle two is 2, the cumulative result is 5 instead of 4 in the second cycle. I think that's why Dr. D was leaning that way until I got 4 awesome embryos.

The wild card here would be cysts, last cycle I had the most stubborn follicular cysts on the planet that took two periods and two weeks of birth control to resolve. I don't know if I'll have them again this time since they aspirate the follies during my retrieval, which you'd think would mean no more cysts but who knows. It would definitely make the decision for me though, if I have cysts hanging around on my next CD2 baseline ultrasound, I have to take a cycle off.