Unexpected Decisions

I finaaaally got my period after what feels like forever! I know it's only been one month off but man did it feel like a long month, especially because my period was a little bit late too. Now that it's here and I feel like my cramps are attempting to compact my insides, I gave my nurse a ring and she brought me in for my baseline ultrasound and labwork.

E and I went in together for this visit and took care of the thaw and transfer consent paperwork. This set has to be completed in person with a witness so we had to wait for a day when E had enough time to come in. We also filled out our financial commitment paperwork and gave them all our credit card information for the FET fees.

Everything was going pretty smoothly until we got to my ultrasound. I don't have any cysts or issues that could cause problems with a transfer but when she waved the wand over my ovaries I saw way more antral follicles than I usually have. I asked her to go back and count them and to my surprise, I have 19-20 antral follies! That's a crazy high number for me, I never have that many, it's a basically normal number. I was floored.

I mentioned the high count to my nurse in passing as I was leaving the ultrasound room and the first thing she did after confirming the number was ask me if I wanted to do another IVF cycle. I was both surprised and not at the same time, that's an amazing AFC for me and could potentially yield a really nice number of embryos. But it would mean starting from the beginning again, IVF, medications, PGD, PGS, the whole shebang all over. It would mean putting off a transfer for at least 2 months. Spending all that money right after we finish paying for the first two cycles.

I told the nurse E and I needed to discuss it further and that we'd proceed with the FET protocol for the time being. The first part of the procedure is the same, two weeks of birth control, so we have a little bit of time to figure things out.

I really wasn't prepared for this option. My last cycle was such a junker it didn't occur to me that I might be perfectly primed now. E and I have been waiting so long to hold our baby I really don't want to delay.  Then again, it's likely we'll need IVF again in the future since we didn't get quite as many embryos as we were hoping for to have multiple children, and doing another round of IVF now would be a lot easier than doing a cycle with a young baby and a mortgage.   It's such a tough decision I'm not sure where we'll go from here.