Round (Cycle) 2...

After the stress of the first cycle, we decided we wanted to be emotionally ready before we began the next cycle.  Since there is no way to plan around a fertility cycle because of the monitoring appointments and blood work, we decided to enjoy our summer vacation and wait until Lisa's most stressful work time of year (summer camp) was over. 

We met with Dr. Saffan and Pam, and we decided we would increase the dosages of fertility medicine so that the cycle wouldn't take as long.  In cycle one, we took medicine to help stimulate the follicles to grow, and followed that with a medicine to prevent ovulation.  In cycle two, we took a different medicine called Lupron; this drug adjusts your hormones and turns off the brain's ability to tell your body to ovulate, giving total control of the cycle to the doctors.

Fortunately, we had no blizzards to contend with and the medicine worked really well; the cycle went surprisingly smoothly.  Lisa's eggs grew quickly, and we were scheduled for the retrieval on November 13th.  We were confident we would get a good number of eggs, and hopeful that we could get more than two of them to fertilize.  If we did have more than two make it to the blastocyst stage of development (about day 5 of growth) we could potentially freeze them for use in a later cycle if we were not successful with this round.

At the retrieval, we had eleven eggs; not as many as cycle one, but we were hopeful they were more mature.  Our first bit of bad news with cycle 2 came later that afternoon when we learned we only had two eggs mature enough for fertilization.  We crossed our fingers and hoped they would develop as well as the first two, but the odds were against that happening.  Shady Grove has great embryologists, and they were able to get two more eggs to mature and fertilized them, although eggs that mature late have less chance of developing normally.

Our embryos at 3 days old, just before the transfer!

The first two embryos did develop well, which was a good sign for us and our ability to make a baby.  We transferred them to Lisa's uterus on November 16th, and crossed our fingers that we'd have good news in two weeks.  Even though we wanted to cheat the two week blood test, we decided to wait.  Home pregnancy tests are extremely unreliable that early on, and we just didn't think we could stomach a false negative or false positive.

Lisa's first blood test was positive, and we were guardedly excited.  We had discussed asking the nurses not to give us the HCG levels from our first week tests, but we couldn't resist the curiosity.  Luckily the numbers grew as they were expected to over the three tests.  We purposely scheduled our first sonogram late because we wanted to avoid seeing a sac without a heartbeat.  At the end of week six, we crossed our fingers and went to see Dr. Saffan.  At this point in the pregnancy, we were far enough along that it was all or nothing.  We'd either see a properly developing embryo or we'd be back where we were almost a year before.  I don't know about Lisa, but I could barely handle the anticipation and nerves.  We saw that we were again pregnant with one embryo, and saw the flicker of the baby's heartbeat.  For the first time in a long time, I felt I was able to breathe.  But when you're expecting, you never stay comfortable for long.  At least cycle 2 was off to a good start.