IVF thoughts

My drug induced haze has evaporated. Sweet Reality, you have me back.

I am doing alright. My body is recovering nicely and I am not too worried about new adhesions/scarring (that's sort of a plus when already having so much adhesion damage. Things are already broken.). My mind, well, that's a different story, but it tries as best as it can to process the information and not give in to sadness.

My infertility story is by no means extraordinary. I've read too many blogs, too many infertility stories to know that unexpected bad news is never far from our doctor's lips. And yet, I wasn't prepared for it. Oh, I was mentally prepared that Dr. Soothing might not be able to open my blocked tube despite the high success probability he cited (who are those people anyway who fall on the good sides of these statistics?), but I so was not prepared that my left tube was even more useless AND unfixable. It caught me off guard. While this result explains nicely why I haven't managed to fall pregnant in those two years, and while this may mean I might not have as crappy eggs as Dr. Soothing may have thought, it means that my tiny hope for a natural pregnancy is in fact microtiny.

IVF is an excellent infertility treatment for tubal factors. It may even have been invented for it. But, unfortunately, I am no more an excellent candidate for it than I was before. IVF's success lies partly in circumventing the tubes, but it also lies partly in numbers. The more eggs, the more embryos, the better the chance to find the one embryo (or two or three...) that looks like it could make it. My past IVF experience tells me that my beaten ovaries are not so much into the number thing. And nobody knows how or if the Asherman's/Endometriosis has functionally damaged my uterine lining.

Only time will tell whether our second IVF will be more successful than the first. I am being cautiously optimistic, so much stuff can happen in an IVF cycle that it is sometimes overpowering. There is nothing one can count on, nothing one can willfully or with a lot of hard work control: not the number of eggs produced, not the number of eggs fertilized, not the uterine lining, not implantation. One can only try to breath and continue on.

One of the smart infertility books that I have lying around here suggests not to go in into one treatment cycle without having a Plan B to hold on to. Honestly though, I don't have a plan B. Plan B was to keeping trying for a natural pregnancy. Not very original, I know. And now even less promising.

Have a good weekend, lovely internet, and thanks so much for checking in with me after surgery!