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green.elephant (Login green.elephant)
Posted Feb 18, 2012 2:31 PM
It's tough - I'm sorry about your chemicals - those suck.
I have high FSH as well, though it sometimes tests at the high end of normal. I'm not a mom through DE yet, but I am working on it - I never tried IVF - we did a few cycles with minimal stimulation hoping to be able to have a retrieval, but each month tests showed that I had maybe just 1-2 eggs, and we wanted better chances if we were going to do IVF. My specialist said I have a less than 5% chance of conceiving with my own eggs. I was 33 when I heard that - pretty devastating, considering all my other tests had been perfectly normal. It was very tough - I read some great books (and not so great books) about infertility. One thought really stuck with me - a doctor told a patient that if they wanted to try again with their own eggs, they could - but if they wanted to go home with a baby, then they should use donor eggs. With an 80% success rate (DE) versus 5% success rate (OE), I warmed up to the idea pretty quickly while also grieving the loss of a genetic connection to a future child. It helps that I told myself I still do have a 5% chance of conceiving with my own eggs - so it's not impossible and maybe someday later that will happen and be a nice surprise - but for now we're ready to move on and get our family started.
Going through the motions of picking out a donor has been difficult - another round of setbacks with delays etc., but after 6+ months we finally have a terrific donor selected and on Monday I start Lupron for our late March cycle. I am really excited - finally starting to smile about the idea that this is likely to work, and if even if it doesn't I'm hopeful that we'll have some frozen embryos to do transfers with later.
Like you said - at the end of the day you want to be a mother - me too. My therapist specializes in IF and is herself a parent via egg donation. She said that in all her years, every single parent has always said "this is the baby I was meant to have" - no matter how it got there. I think that the added bonus of getting to experience a pregnancy with the baby will help our bond and I know that both nature & nurture contribute to a child's development.
In response to your writing that other ladies are telling you not to give up because you are getting pregnant - I say the opposite - I had a chemical pregnancy and that was enough for me. For me, it confirmed that even though I could get pregnant, my eggs were not viable - this actually made it a little easier for me to move on to DE. My rationale was that even when my eggs do finally fertilize, they're not healthy enough to stick around and develop into a healthy pregnancy.
I get the feeling that I might be one of the few women who has not gone through OE IVF before moving onto DE - I just couldn't do it with such slim chances. My husband is in the medical field and said he would never do a procedure on a patient that had only a 5% success rate or lower, so we tended to think of the statistical rational versus the emotional attachment. We don't want to drain our savings doing OE IVF and DE IVF - so we're proceeding with the best chance of coming home with a healthy baby and keeping our fingers crossed that it works.
I wish you the best of luck - it's a tough decision to come around to, but once you find a donor you are excited about and things progress, then it's actually pretty exciting! I'm not a parent yet - but I know this child will feel like my own and I'm so happy that we have this as an option so that I can still see my husband's traits in our child. The more I learn, the more I know DE is more common then we think - I had so many donors picked out & by the time I called within hours of them being posted online they were already reserved. As science progresses I think more egg banks will be popping up and it'll be even more common.
Good luck! |
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