Decisions

I arrived in Colombia last week and went to the clinic on Friday. After 4 days of ovarian stimulation, no eggs could be seen but the doctor thought it was still early. After 3 more days, only one very small follicle could be found, so we cancelled the cycle. At his point, we are faced with the decision, once more:

On the one hand, as I have no return ticket yet, I could wait for another month and try again with my own eggs. The downside is that it means I’d stay away from my husband for at least 2 more months, and the chances continue to be very low. We have tried 4 cycles of stimulation and 3 of them yielded no eggs at all. The one cycle where we got two perfect eggs was very encouraging but it doesn’t seem that the odds are in our favor.

On the other hand, we could start right now with a donor cycle. It means that in 2 weeks I could be having a transfer and in one month, a confirmed pregnancy, assuming it all works well. The probabilities of this to work are much higher, however, we already tried a donor cycle in which not a single embryo survived, against all odds.

After much discussion, mainly with the pressure of time (time apart as well as time lost in this process), we decided to try the donor cycle. The doctor is looking for an ideal donor to stimulate so we have fresh eggs. This is supposed to increase slightly the chances of success, but it also means that we don’t know from the beginning how many eggs we will be able to fertilize.

I don’t know how to feel now. It’s really a combination of hope and sadness and impatience. It seems our process has not followed closely the expected odds so we can only hope. If this cycle doesn’t work, that would be 2 IVF cycles spent and 2 more to go. Will we finally become parents in 2020?