Still Here

I'll be quick about this, because I rose very early this morning to 1) finish contact papering the pantry shelves, 2) register for a make-it-and-take-it dinner place I'm supposed to be going to with a friend in a couple of days (but won't be if I don't sign up before the cut off today) and 3) get to work early. Hahahaha. I got the last four pieces of contact paper cut (turns out I made them about 3/8" too short) and then the lure of the computer sucked me in - I've spent the last hour catching up with as many of you as possible.

We've moved, although we still have a few boxes worth of stuff inside and about half of the garage at the old house. We're getting unpacked, but it will take a bit of time, mostly because I haven't taken any time off work to do this. While I hate to pack, I actually rather enjoy unpacking and getting things organized, so if I had a big chunk of time to do it, we'd be completely unpacked within a few days.

My mom moves in this weekend. It will be interesting. My mind keeps blocking the fact that the whole reason for this move is so she could come live with us. Let's hope we manage to co-exist with minimal strife and that we don't all kill each other.

I talked with Doc the day after our BFN. He gave us two options: 1) do another FET, this time transferring three blasts or 2) leave the 8 blasts we have frozen and go onto another fresh cycle, this time with slightly lower stims. He is concerned that at this point we've transferred back two terrific-looking day 3 embryos and two fantastic day 5 blasts, and nothing has stuck. He thinks we've got the blood clotting issues and immune issues under control, and my lining looked great. So he thinks it may be an embryo quality issue that isn't visible to the naked eye, even via microscope.

He thinks that given R's drastic swings in sperm production (from almost literally zero sperm, highly fragmented while he's not on meds to pretty much totally normal when he is), there could still be an inherent sperm quality issue that is causing problems. He also thinks that while my E2 levels didn't rise too terribly high given the 32 eggs retrieved, he would want to keep everything even lower next time to try to make sure it isn't an egg quality issue. I wasn't on a high dose of stims to start with (300 units for the first two days, then 225 after that), so there isn't a whole lot of room to go lower, but there is a little bit. I imagine he'd start me on 225 and then drop down to 150, but we didn't get into details.

I'm not up to another fresh cycle at the moment, so we've opted to do a frozen cycle in December, then consider another fresh cycle after the beginning of the year (probably March or April) if the frozen doesn't work. Lupron begins on Nov. 11 - hard to believe it's less than three weeks away - and the transfer will be sometime around Dec. 15.

I'll keep trying to catch up with all of you as I can, even though I'm not posting a whole lot right now.