No Cheese. Just Whine.

This past Sunday, we got the call that the embryo transfer would be on Monday, Memorial Day and that we still had just the one embryo. The three immature eggs they tried to fertilize were unsuccessful so all our hopes, dreams and money were now riding on the Rudy, the Lone Embryo (the sequel). Are there such things as Memorial Day miracles? Anyone remember any television specials on the subject?

The nurse I spoke to didn’t know the quality of the embryo. She just said, “Be here tomorrow at 11:30am unless we call you and tell you otherwise.” And I knew what that meant. It meant that calling me and telling me otherwise would mean that there were no embryos left to transfer. For the remainder of that day and the next morning, I hoped that my cell phone wouldn’t ring. This is the exact opposite of how I was when I was single but obviously, things were different then.

When Monday morning arrived, we headed to the clinic and despite the fact that I hadn’t received any calls to the contrary; I was still terrified that more bad news was to come. When I spoke to my parents on Saturday night to bring them up to speed, my dad said, “You really can’t catch a break, can you?” I know he said this out of frustration for me, which I appreciate but that sentence has echoed in my head over and over ever since he said it. Probably because it feels that way: I can’t seem to catch a break and when I do, it feels like it just prolongs the torment.

It only takes one… but I paid for more.

At 11:30, we walked in and I gave the receptionist my name. She put a bracelet around my wrist that had my name and birthdate on it. I figured if she was doing that than we must still have something to transfer. As she fastened it, she looked at me for a second and said to me, “Why do you look so sad?” I was completely taken aback. My first though was ‘Is she f*cking kidding me?’ Where to begin? I’ve been trying to get pregnant for two years! I’ve just spent all my savings. The odds of this working are close to none. This nightmare feels like it’s never going to end. I had an entire laundry list of reasons that I didn’t feel all smiley at that moment. However, instead of telling her all this and risking having a crying fit in the waiting room, I responded with, “I’m Catholic. We’re always sad.” She laughed as I quickly backed away from her and found a seat.

After a few of us changed into our gowns, we were told to follow the receptionist to a separate waiting room that’s outside the procedure room where the transfers were to happen. As we were walking, a nurse called my name and told me to stop. I turned around and she was standing there with a phone in her hand. “It’s for you.”

Of course, I thought it had to be either someone calling to tell me that I had nothing to transfer or it was the president calling to give me instructions on a secret mission. Really – this call seemed so dramatic and bizarre, I had no idea what to expect. Shockingly, it was my doctor who was the last person I expected to hear from simply because I haven’t heard from her at all this entire cycle.

With regards to the clinic I’ve been going to, you go in, you get blood work and you get instructions through a nurse later that afternoon. Then, when you start getting sonograms, you get whoever the doctor is on call. The same goes for the retrieval and the transfer. As it happened, my doctor wasn’t there for any of that. I have no doubt she’s been involved behind the scenes and making decisions here and there but truth be told, this phone call was the first I ever actually spoke to her since we started this round of in vitro.

Her first sentence was, “Well, the fertility report wasn’t what we had hoped.” Gee, there’s an understatement.

She continued, “You do have a beautiful 8-cell embryo though and I’d rather have one 8-cell embryo than two 6-cell embryos’s any day of the week. All in all though, we’re going to hope this cycle works but if not, I think its clear there’s an egg quality issue that we’ll need to treat and there’s a few ways to do that.”

I must point out that I’m standing at the nurse’s station in my hospital gown right as I’m about to go into my transfer and I’m being told that I have one great embryo, shitty eggs and if this cycle doesn’t work (you know… the cycle that I’m still currently in), I’m going to need to spend thousands of more dollars I don’t have. Not to criticize but I’m not sure if this is the ideal time to be having this conversation.

I said to her, “You realize that you had me to the estrogen priming protocol and you added Menopur to my stims and it didn’t do anything to help in the least. We had the same exact response as I had with my clinical trial, which wasn't even tailored specifically to me... and was free by the way. Also, I’m happy to hear you have other suggestions as to what we can do going forward, but I don’t have any money. I just spent it all on this. We have absolutely nothing in our savings account.”

Her response? “Well then I guess this one has to work.”

Ummmm, yeah. That would be nice, wouldn't it? If only one of us could make that actually happen.

We made some closing statements to our call and I hung up completely dumbfounded, pissed off and as always, hormonal. I walked into the hallway and there was the receptionist who had asked me why I looked so sad earlier. She handed me a cap to put on my hair and she said to me, “Look. Take a deep breath. You wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think there was a chance this could work so try and think positive.” It was at that moment, I burst into tears. So much for having a positive attitude.

I appreciated her pep talk (or at least her attempt at one) and I know that when it comes to infertility, this is how it is. It’s emotional, expensive, and more than anything, there is no logic. Really. I’ve heard stories of women having tons of amazing embryos that never get pregnant and then I’ve heard stories of women who had only one halfway decent embryo that went on to have healthy babies. You just never know and you have to hang in there. The trouble is I’m all out of pep and I’m fresh out of hope.

No more money. No more insurance. Three IUI’s. Three In Vitro’s. No pregnancies ever. And now, if my eggs have been determined as crap, we have to figure out how to handle that. Yes, I know there are donor eggs, but they cost $4000 and even then, even if we could afford that, we STILL have no guarantees it’ll work or that we don’t have yet another undiagnosed problem. If my life were a VH1’s Behind the Music, this would be the point where I started a cocaine habit.

I’m going to follow the instructions, do whatever I can in this two week wait that I think might help and hope for a downright miracle but this, my friends, it the lowest I’ve ever been. I’ll get through it, as we all do, but today, at this moment, I honestly don’t know how.