Saturday, May 24, 2014

With the good comes the 'Hey, wait a second!'

So last week BJ took his swimmers to the sperm equivalent of the olympic trials. It was terrible timing because in addition to barely taking a month's worth of vitamins over the last 3, it was after a vacation where he ate and drank whatever he wanted to for an entire week.  When you don't have the best history going in, all these little things can make a big difference.  So anyway, we were not really expecting a big improvement from nearly 3 years ago and our fertility clinic defaults to using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). So a sperm will be directly injected into our eggs.

BUT LO...

Like a fine wine, BJ seems to have improved with age.  Me on the other hand...I must be milk that went bad by the age of 16... [insert a string of multiple curse words here].

Anyway, BJ's count was on the crappy side, which considering the poor timing on multiple fronts, I don't really care.  I can feed him a little more protein, nag him about his vitamins and BOOM, he's proven that can repair itself pretty fast.

His motility was better, despite him being dehydrated, but this also wasn't a big deal...again...stay hydrated.

And, finally, as we were told 3 years ago, his morphology which was 4% normal shaped (Kruger strict criteria) in 2011 bumped up to a whopping....

12%

We were told that this was the one number that couldn't get better...and while it's still not ideal and some clinics that don't do ICSI for everybody would offer it to us and some wouldn't it's a hell of a lot closer to the normal of 15% than his 4% was 3 years ago.  

So while I cheer, it definitely hit home to me that it was definitely me, and my eggs, that are the problem.  So it's a celebratory slap in the face, I guess.  But it does make me sad to think that BJ could have married almost any other woman and probably had all the children he wanted the old-fashioned way.  I've taken that story from him.  

The last three years we were under the impression that we suffered from co-factor infertility.  We both had issues...but now we know more definitively that isn't the case. Since we have pursued the egg donation route this time, we can now more confidently go about this cycle knowing my eggs were at least the bigger issue if not the sole problem.  My little embabies fought so hard to stay alive they really pushed the envelope and didn't give us the clearest picture by failing before or after day 3 which is what tells you if it's female or male factor contributing to the embryo quality.  They always started failing on day 3.  

While Dr. Donesky, has always been pretty confident the fault lied in my eggs, there is always doubt that you are doing the wrong thing.  He felt more confident after he treated me for embryo quality and saw some improvement, but it wasn't near enough improvement to have healthy, viable babies.  But after BJ's updated results, I feel better going forward, too.

Peace, Love, Onwards and Upwards,
MK



         

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