The two-week wait was hard but I kept my hopes up. We returned to the US really hoping that it was 4 of us in the return flight. Finally, the day for the pregnancy test came and I had already purchased a home kit. As soon as I woke up I tested and got a negative response. This was already disappointing as I had read about “false positives” being really common due to the added hormones in the body during fertility treatment. However, I had requested from my local doctor that a blood test be ordered to be sure. We went to the lab on Saturday morning and were told the result would come back late afternoon. I checked my email and notifications a million times in the next 36 hours, until finally on Monday morning we got the result back. HCG measured at 14, which is considered indeterminate for a regular pregnancy, but almost certainly negative for an IVF pregnancy.
The fertility doctor told us there would not be a pregnancy this time, but we should repeat the test a week later anyway. Against all odds I kept thinking that as long as I wasn’t bleeding, I could still hope. And this morning, 4 days after the test, I started bleeding…
Back to zero, start thinking about scheduling the next trip and start all over again. We knew from the beginning that we probably needed more than one IVF cycle, which is why we got the 4-cycle plan.
From the last cycle, we had started with 2 of my own eggs and 6 donor eggs, my two eggs and 4 from the donor were successfully fertilized, and none of the donor’s eggs survived to maturity, which was really puzzling to the doctor. It gave me hopes to think that the odds were so much in my favor that only my two eggs had developed. But now that they are gone, we have no frozen embryos.
I’ll be 40 years old in a month and I won’t have a happy news to share with my family over Christmas.
A Stork's Journey 