Bad News and (Not So) Easy Choices

This morning, or more accurately this afternoon, E and I went in for our infertility consultation. Even though I tried to be optimistic, it was disheartening to have our challenges laid out so plainly. The RE went over all our test results and all our options, which are extremely limited. Because E has such severe male factor infertility, we can only go with IVF. Because I have so few eggs, we can only go with IVF. So basically, even if we were only dealing with one form of infertility, we'd still need to do IVF to get pregnant.

Right now E is a bit of a wild card. We're not sure whether his sperm are non motile because they're dead, or because they're just lazy fuckers. Our doctor ran another SA on E and we should have those results tomorrow, but considering the poor quality of his boys overall, the doctor is suggesting that we split the eggs.

Lets say we retrieve 13 eggs, and 10 are mature enough to use. Our RE is suggesting that we use E's sperm for 5 of the eggs and donor sperm for the other 5. That way, if none of E's swimmers are able to produce viable embryos, we still have those 5 other hopefully good quality embryos to implant. If we didn't do this and none of E's swimmers were able to produce embryos, the cycle would be cancelled and we would be out all the money we had spent.

I am not in much better shape than E. I had my AFC and while my uterus looked just fine, my ovaries only had 7 antral follicles between them. That's a pretty awful number for a 26 year old, the RE was hoping to see more like 20, making my high FSH a fluke. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, my awful numbers are accurate and I really am running out of eggs. Yay :(

Now we get to wait for a phone call tomorrow. If E's results are improved, we can proceed with IVF. If they're still awful, we need to seriously consider whether we're okay with using donor sperm.  E was really against it when we discussed it before, but it might be the only way we can achieve a viable pregnancy. It's a lot to deal with and we're going to have to do some real thinking.