All Good News!

At the appointment on Friday, the baby looked just beautiful. It measured at a perfect 7 weeks, 4 days and had a heart rate of 150.

We are flying high and so excited. The spotting lasted less than 24 hours and hasn't returned. My RE thinks it could have been the 2nd yolk sac passing or from the change from PIO to oral progesterone. Yes, I got to take my last shot on Tuesday!!! Wahoo!

I'll be 8 weeks tomorrow. 4 more weeks and we're going to start on the nursery. Can't wait!

Dear Baby

Dear Precious Baby in my Womb,

Please grow and flourish. We're going to get to look at you again tomorrow. I hope your beautiful little heart will be beating away and that you are healthy and perfect. I am so nervous and have so much fear for your well-being because we lost your brother at this very point when he was growing in me.

I'm praying for you, Baby. I want to meet you in November.

Love,

Mommy

Ain't Life Grand!

I got to hear my baby's heartbeat today. I am 6wks1d and all is well. Everything looked just perfect.

I'm now sitting on my front porch with my laptop and a neighbor (college student) across the street is on his porch playing acoustic guitar. It's about 75 degrees. Only my DH coming home could make it better! Alas, Thursday is coming.

Nerves

We went back to the OB on Friday. DH went with me. So glad he did. We were able to see the hb. 5wks, 4days. So the last time we were pg, the baby stopped developing at in the 7th week (can't remember if it was 6wks 2 or 4 days. So here I am in the 7th week and I'm on pins and needles. Thankfully, I'm going back to the OB today and then back to the RE tomorrow. I'm hoping that these visits can ease my mind and give me some comfort that this pg will be healthy.

4 hours to u/s. What a relief! If I didn't have these appts, I'd be going completely crazy. Let's get past this hurdle and maybe I can find the joy again.

Can you say....MISDIAGNOSIS!!!!!

So I went to the IF clinic in ATL. After much probing with the, well, probe, it was determined that the tech at my ob's office did not have experience looking at over stimulated ovaries. What she thought was a gestational sac was actually a huge corpus luteum. What an enormous relief!!!

So we finally got that 2nd beta back and it was good. I also got the one from yesterday. I did a calculator from the first one to the one yesterday and it says it's doubling every 45.7 hours.

The fetal pole was "beautiful." They also saw a second sac, but couldn't see a fetal pole in that one. I wonder if it has stopped developing or if it's just slower.

My ATL clinic invited me to continue to monitor with them until wk 12. I jumped all over that!

So tired....must sleep.

The very latest

My in-state RE wants to see me first thing tomorrow and to arrive prepared for the possibility of surgery. If the little rebel embryo is large enough that it may pose a problem, he will go ahead and take it tomorrow.

I'd just as soon get this over with so tomorrow is fine with me. If we wait to see if it fails on it's own, I'll just be on pins and needles until it either happens or doesn't.

I finally fell apart a bit ago when I had to call someone to go with me. I had been freakishly calm all day. DH is out of town working and won't be here tomorrow and since there is a possiblity of surgery I can't go alone.

Who ever heard of a Heterotopic Pregnancy?

WTF? I went in today for my 5 wk u/s and there is one nice little yolk sac in the uterus. Unfortunately, there's another yolk sac outside of the uterus. It appears to be in my left fallopian tube. They drew blood to check my hCG levels and will do so again on Fri to compare. I also will have another u/s on Fri.

If things go well, the embryo in the tube will cease to grow and my body will absorb it. If that doesn't happen, I'll have to have surgery to have it removed. I'm trying to find out about the success of keeping the in utero pregnancy when this happens.

Does anybody have any information on surgery for heterotopic pregnancy?

If I'd known then

A friend of mine she cries at night, and she
Calls me on the phone
Sees babies everywhere she goes and she
Wants one of her own.
She's waited long enough she says
And still she can't decide
Pretty soon she'll have to choose and it tears her up inside...
She's scared...
scared she'll run out of time.

This song, Nick of Time, was on Bonnie Raitt's 1989 album also titled Nick of Time. I spent most of 1990 wearing out the cassette tape of this album. I LOVED every song on it. Interestingly, this song didn't move me any more than any of the rest. I was 24, wild, and free (and probably on birth control). I remember that summer almost every weekend a big group of friends and I would go up to the north Georgia mountains and have the most wonderful, carefree weekends. One girl would bring her guitar and we'd sit around and sing songs from this very album. I practically breathed this album. And I did not have a clue to what the verses above spoke.

These days, I've put this album on my phone. I was out walking this morning with my phone on shuffle mode going through all of the songs on it, but we came around to Nick of Time. Now it almost stops me in my tracks. When I was 37, I made up my mind that I just couldn't wait any more. I had to find a husband and get married. Luckily for me, my plan actually worked. We got married at 39. I was no longer listening to this song, but I was living it.

Isn't life funny.

Finally

The beta is in: 384 That's for 12dp3dt.

I'd say more, but I really want to eat and sleep. Just as it should be.

A quick word about snow and embryo transfers

Sadly, I wasn't able to get my beta yesterday. We got 7 inches of snow here. In the south 2 inches will shut everything down. We just don't get enough snow here for it to be feasible to invest in snow-moving or salt-spreading equipment. When we do get snow, it usually only hangs around for a day. Case in point, it's supposed to be 45 degrees today. So the long and the short of it is that my gynecologist's office was locked up nice and tight yesterday when I trekked the 4+ blocks through the snow, none of which had melted or been moved (see above), to go get my blood drawn. It was a good walk though. Walking through 7 inches of snow is kind of like walking in soft beach sand. I think I got a pretty nice butt workout.

Okay, I'm sure some people are going to see my blog about transferring 6 embryos and think we are crazy or just plain stupid. Therefore, I am going to go over a bit of history and the decision-making process so that all may see how we made our decision. And believe me, it wasn't an easy one.

Our first transfer which was about 1 1/2 years ago, we transferred 2 embies and got a BFN. Our 2nd tranfer was last fall. We thawed 8 and 4 of them survived. We tranferred all 4. At that point, we had enough information to think that there was no way I was going to get pg. We were dumbfounded when we got a positive beta. My RE had basically given us no hope. We tranferred 4 and we had one attach. We saw the HB at 5 weeks, 5 days, but 2 weeks later it had stopped. We were devastated by the loss, but at the same time had renewed hope. Even my RE changed her mind and said we could do it. We could get pg and have a healthy baby. She was wrong. How often do you hear an MD say that? So with renewed hope we set off to do another fresh cycle. We went to the best fertility clinic on the East Coast. This time, we knew so much more and we meant business.

As previously noted, we got 7 eggs, 7 of them fertilized and 6 of them grew to beautiful embies of 7 to 10 cells. There were 2 perfect 8 celled embies. I started out afraid to transfer 5, the minimum recommended number for my age. Cornell recommends a woman my age transfer 5 or 6. Why? Because the likelihood of any embryos created from the eggs of a 43 year old woman attaching is extremely low. Also, embryologists are still not to the point yet where they know which embryos really have the greatest chance of implanting. There are a whole lot of stories out there of not-so-good-looking embryos that drs don't think have a chance turning into healthy babies. I told my dr of my fears and he reminded me of the low likelihood of HOM's. In my age group, the chance of more than 2 embryos attaching to the womb is less than 10%. Couple that with the fact that any success at all is unlikely at my age and you've got some pretty dismal numbers. According to the CDC, the likelihood of a 43 yo woman conceiving through IVF with her own eggs is only about 11% (based on 2005 data). The percentage of 43 yo women who took home baby was only 4.9%.

So let's see... a less than 10% chance of HOM inside an 11% chance of any pregnancy at all. See what I mean, dismal.

So you see, it's not crazy. Now you may be thinking that we're crazy to try at all. Well, that may be, but we just believe that we will be the exception. Everything we've done has been a surprise to the drs; the way I've responded to the drugs, that I got pg at all. It's been one big exception to the rule after the next.

Let me be clear here. I don't think I would have felt the need at all to make this post if it weren't for Nadya. Bitch. She's going to screw it up for so many that come after us. There is already legislation being put forth in my state to limit the number of embryos transferred (more on that later).

Clearly, I am not psychic....

...but I am pregnant!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, I peed on a stick this morning. I know, I know, I said I'm not a girl that does that anymore. However, this time I was so certain that it had not worked that I wanted to go ahead and POAS to get to that terrible moment when I find out that I'm not pg over with. How wrong I was! It turned so fast that I was stunned by it. And we're not talking about a faint pink line. It was nice and dark...probably half as dark as the control line.

Poor DH. I did the test at 6 am. I think I scared him to death. He awoke from a dead sleep to my screaming. He had trouble waking up enough to grasp what was going on. Alas, when he did get it, we had a beautiful moment and just could not stop looking at the stick over and over and over again. It now sits on my bedside table right next to the photo of my embies. What a beautiful sight!

We are stunned. We are thrilled. I wish DH didn't have to fly off this afternoon to go work. I wish he could stay here with me and bask in the glow of my pregnancy.

Keep sending the good thoughts ladies. We need another 36 weeks of healthy pregnancy! Thank you so, so much for the support that you're sending me.