5 Embryos

Right now, in a lab about 15 minutes away from our house, there are five embryos with half of my DNA and half of my husband's DNA growing in a petri dish. Possibly more than one dish. I really have no idea.

Two years ago, we opened ourselves up to the possibility of having children when I had my IUD removed at my yearly physical. Our plan was to just let whatever happened happen. We figured that eventually I'd miss a period and we'd have a baby some time in 2009 or 2010. I actually figured it would happen pretty quickly. We were both healthy and we were two years younger back then, how hard could this baby-making thing be, right? Wrong.

So how did we come to this?

It's a long story. Ready?

August 2008. IUD is removed. Life goes on as it always had. Months go by and things are great. I'm not even that disappointed that I haven't gotten pregnant yet for awhile. All I am keeping track of at this point is how far apart my periods are occurring. Usually 26 or 27 days apart.
April 2009. I have a very short cycle. 21 days. I'm a little concerned, but don't do anything different the next month.
May 2009. Another short cycle. 24 days. Now I'm getting concerned that letting whatever happens happen may not eventually yield the results we want. I decided to start charting my cycles. This consisted of buying a basal thermometer and taking my temperature daily as soon as I woke up. I entered the temperatures into a website and it made graphs for me. Doing this charting would let me know whether I was ovulating, and when, and if there were enough days between ovulation and my period beginning to allow a pregnancy to develop.
Summer 2009. Charting, charting, charting. Graphs indicate that I ovulate normally, my cycle should be sufficient to develop a pregnancy, and our timing was usually pretty good. In July, I even had a few pregnancy symptoms as my period approached and I was just positive that I was pregnant. I wasn't. At some point that summer I ended up at the doctor's office for some ear issues (turned out I have TMJ, this is unrelated) and she asked me how the baby-making was going. I told her and she said if after 6 months of charting I wasn't pregnant, to call her.
November 2009. 6 months of charting, over a year of no birth control. I call my doctor and she refers me to our HMO's Reproductive Endocrinology office. I make an appointment with the RE, they say to bring the husband to the first appointment. Ok. The appointment goes pretty well, our doctor was really nice and assured us that we were young and healthy and they could help us get pregnant. They take full family medical histories, ask us all about our own medical histories and suggest a couple of tests to be taken. First - I should go get some bloodwork done downstairs and then we should schedule a hysterosalpingogram, or HSG, for me. Also, the husband needs to get a sperm analysis done. My bloodwork came back normal and we scheduled the HSG, which is an x-ray test of the uterus and fallopian tubes. They inject a dye up into the uterus and have you move around a bit on the x-ray table to make sure that your tubes are open and clear and that your uterus doesn't have any cysts or other abnormalities in or on it. My HSG came out clear, and was around ovulation day so they encouraged us to "try" that night and see if the test itself cleared things up to the point that we could conceive that month. Apparently this is pretty common. It didn't work.
December 2009. Once we knew for sure that we didn't conceive in November the husband scheduled his semen analysis. We received the results of it in mid-to-late December. Count normal. Motility normal. Morphology well below normal. Neither of us has any idea about this morphology term. So we did some Googling and found that it means the heads of the sperm aren't shaped correctly to penetrate an egg. We received this news right before we left for a 10-day trip to FL to visit family so we didn't really do much more in 2009.
January 2010. We meet with the RE again and he tells us that low morphology means it's pretty unlikely that we will conceive in any given month without help. He suggests that we try an intrauterine insemination (IUI) procedure the next cycle. He says that pairing this procedure with me taking a drug called Clomid will give us a little better chance. The Clomid will allow me to release more than one egg each month, giving the few properly-shaped sperm more targets to hit. I begin taking the Clomid on day 5 of my cycle and take it through day 9. On day 10 I go in for an ultrasound to see how many follicles I have growing in each ovary and I get bloodwork done to see if I'm nearing ovulation.
February 2010. I keep going in daily for bloodwork and ultrasound until the day that they think the follicles are almost mature. And then one day they tell me I need to take a "trigger shot" which will induce ovulation 36 hours later. This shot is basically pure human chorionic gonadotropin (hcg), the pregnancy hormone. It has to be administered intra-muscularly in my upper hip (butt) with a very long needle. By my husband. It hurt. But then just under 36 hours later we went to the doctor's office with a semen sample. They wash it and spin it and give it back to us and we take it upstairs where it's loaded into a big syringe with a skinny plastic tube instead of a needle, and that plastic tube is threaded up through my cervix and the semen is deposited. It barely has to do any swimming! We're sure this will work! It didn't. The husband gets another semen analysis done because apparently new batches are made every 7-8 weeks. This result is not any better than the first. Also this month we get a new car for me, and we choose the less expensive of the two we narrow it down to, in case we need extra money later in the year for all this baby-making.
March 2010. We do the same thing again - another IUI. It doesn't work. The husband is told by the RE to go see the urologist. The urologist examines the husband and says there's nothing apparently wrong with him, they do not know what causes this low morphology but there are some supplements that he can take that may increase the % of pointy ones after two months. The husband stops on his way home and picks up some of the supplements and begins taking them right away. The urologist also suggests that while IUIs are inexpensive, they're not that much more likely to get me pregnant than just trying on our own, so we should begin to consider In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF).
April 2010. We take the month off from any procedures. It's our anniversary this month and we have a vacation planned at the end of the month. We decide that if we don't conceive on our own this month we will try IUI one more time before considering other options. Also this month, we get a big refund back from the IRS and instead of spending it, we put it away in case we choose to do IVF. We did not conceive on our own in April.
May 2010. We go back to the RE and tell them we want to try one more IUI since the husband has been taking the supplements. This time we plan on doing a double IUI which means one procedure the day after the trigger (day before ovulation) and one procedure the day after that (ovulation day) to give ourselves a bit of a better shot. But ovulation ends up falling while we are out of town for Memorial Day weekend, so the nurse just tells us to try on our own since it's really the multiple eggs giving us the better chance, and not the actual procedure. So we do that. We did not conceive in May.
June 2010. We go talk to a new RE at a clinic where they specialize in IVF. Friends of ours conceived through this clinic in 2009 using donor eggs and are expecting twins. They rave about the clinic. We meet the doctor and he tells us there's a procedure called ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) where they use a tiny needle to inject each egg with one sperm to promote fertilization. This means that the shape of the sperm doesn't matter! We go over the costs (a lot) and the odds of the IVF procedure working (70-80%) and the risk of multiples (40-50% likelihood of twins) and decide that this is our best bet for baby-making. We schedule an appointment for a week later to get the ball rolling.

To be continued...