Transfer Shitshow

First off, I want to say how lucky and grateful I am to have such a wonderful community of people supporting me on this journey and all the ups and downs. It means the world to me to have so much support. I’m technically doing this by myself, but I never feel alone.

The infertility journey is such an emotional rollercoaster, even before they start pumping you full of hormones. The term warrior is thrown around a lot in this community and it’s true. Even in the “easiest” journey, there are hiccups and roadblocks and speed bumps and detours and other driving terminology. Not one part of this is linear and to make it through this process you have to learn to roll with the punches and all the shit thrown at you. It’s a lot.

My transfer yesterday was all the ups and downs of an entire journey all packed into one day. It was such a clusterfuck from literally the minute I woke up, but at the end of the day, there is a little embryo all safe and tucked into my cushy uterus, hopefully getting nice and sticky for the next 9 months!

Back to the shitshow! It started when my alarm went off yesterday morning telling me it was time to take my progesterone in oil shot. 

I took yesterday off to relax (hahahahaha!), so I got to sleep in a little bit. I was just putting the vial of PIO under my armpit to warm it up when my phone rang and it was my clinic. My first thought was bad news. That none of the 5 fertilized eggs made it to blastocyst and the transfer was cancelled. Because why else would they be calling?

It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t the best news either. One of the eggs had made it to a blastocyst, but it was graded really low. It was a 2BB. Now the grades can be kind of arbitrary and every clinic could grade the same embryo completely different. The number is rated from 6 to 1, with 6 being the highest. It’s basically how the cells are expanding. A 2 is not the best, because it means that only half of the cells are at the blastocyst stage. You really want a 3 or higher to transfer.

The nurse literally had no other information and couldn’t answer any specifics (THEN WHY WOULD YOU BE THE PERSON TO CALL???), but told me that my doctor recommended transferring it and she could try and get the doctor to call me back to answer more questions, if I would like that.

YES PLEASE.

So then I went to Google. And some of it was bad news, but some of it was good. There were some posts that thawed eggs were slower to fertilize than fresh-out-of-the-ovary ones. And that a 2BB one day, coud be a 4BB the next. The problem was my clinic doesn’t do Day 6 fresh transfers. So it was transfer this one low-graded one, or wait to see how they progress, have them frozen and start this all over again.

I was conflicted. I do trust my doctor. She’s very experienced and has worked in this field for a long time. But part of me was like “are you just trying to placate me and since I’ve already taken all the hormones, might as well transfer it, even though we know it won’t work?” I wasn’t OK with going through it just to go through with it. 

This all happened before like 10 AM. 

Finally the doctor calls. It’s not my doctor, it’s another doctor in the clinic. So I ask her, ask her what the cells look like, are they still dividing, are the odds good it will keep expanding, etc. She says maybe. Nothing is guaranteed. So I ask her if she would transfer it. She says no.

via GIPHY

I’m like “say what?” She said my doctor has more experience with transferring these lower graded embryos and them taking, but she does not so she wouldn’t transfer it. And then she’s like “so do you still want to proceed?”

Then she hands the phone back to the nurse. And I say “well that wasn’t helpful at all.” And finally the nurse says “would you like to talk to the embryologist?” YES PLEASE.

(I’m unsure why this isn’t standard practice. Looking back, my old clinic, ONLY the lab called to talk about this stuff. Because people always have follow up questions. And only people who work in the lab can answer these questions!)

So thankfully the embryologist calls back, the one that has been looking at my eggs all along, and tells me she thinks it looks good. (YAY!) She said that she looked at the eggs at 6:45 AM and that’s when they were graded. But she said all looked really good and that it would probably be a 3BB or 4BB at the time of transfer. (YAY! YAY!) And that they try to only disturb the eggs from the incubator as few times as possible, so that they can grow and expand. She said checking on them too often is like waking a sleeping baby.

WHEW. That was such a relief and I was so glad to have talked to her.

At this point it was time to shower and get ready to go. I did one of the Circle + Bloom meditations to relax me (HIGHLY recommend to anyone going through any kind of fertility treatment and you get 15% off with that link!), then my friend Marisue came to pick me up and we were on our way!

I chose to do the acupuncture before and after the transfer right at the clinic. It’s really great that they offer it. And since my acupuncturist doesn’t work Thursdays, this was the best way to get those sessions in without having to schlep all over the city finding someone to do it.

It was…different. I don’t know much about acupuncture, but I know how it is usually done and this guy didn’t do it that way. He just put in like 5 needles and called it a day. Didn’t check my pulse or anything. I assume he just used standard points, which OK. But for the price they charged, I’d like a little more personalized care.

But it helped. I listened to the same meditation and after that, plus acupuncture, I was completely relaxed and ready to put a baby in my uterus.

I finished acupuncture around 2:20 PM. And then I sat. And sat. And sat some more. Around 3:15 I went out into the hallway to flag someone down because not only had it been almost an hour, you also need a full bladder for the procedure and my bladder was FILLED and was this transfer happening any time soon?

They came in to tell me they were running way behind and that it would be another 10-15 minutes. And the nurse then came in to talk about the procedure and the limitations after it and then she talked about my medications.

She started by telling me to start the estrogen. I interrupted her and told her I had been on the estrogen for 2 weeks. Then she was like “oh, keep taking it then.” Then she said “start taking baby aspirin”, again I interrupted and said I already had been. Then she said to add in the progesterone starting tomorrow. And I stopped her and said my calendar said to start Saturday. And she was like “let me get this straightened out.”

At this point, I lost it and the tears came and I couldn’t stop them. I think I’ve mentioned some of the frustrations I’ve had with this clinic before, but this is just so typical of them. Their communication and lack thereof is horrendous. It seems like one hand never knows what the other is doing. Thankfully I’m an old pro at navigating all this, and advocate for myself and remind them what I need, but on the day of the transfer, a day that needed to be as stress free as possible, this was too much. All my zen from acupuncture was gone. I was amped up and stressed and knew that does not make a good environment for an embryo.

On top of that? When the nurse came back, she came back with the doctor who was doing my transfer. GUESS WHO IT WAS? The one from the morning who said she wouldn’t even bother transferring my embryo. 

FUCKING GREAT.

At this point I was trying to hold back the tears. But she noticed and asked what was the matter. And then I lost my shit. I was crying and yelling and letting them know how awful they made the experience, how the miscommunication was infuriating and that it seemed like they didn’t even know who I was and I was just another uterus.

Their excuse was that even though I was a fresh transfer (meaning the embryo wasn’t previously thawed), it was really a frozen transfer protocol because they weren’t my eggs. So they were giving me medication info based on that.

Well that sent me off again. I mean, how fucking hard is it to take 2 minutes to LOOK at my chart before you come in? I’ve already been waiting an hour, what is a few more minutes? I am a human being and I know that they do lots of these procedures each day, but I should 100 percent not feel like just a number. As if this whole journey hasn’t been stressful enough!

And then I said to the doctor “and honestly, no offense, but after the conversation with you this morning, I really don’t feel comfortable having you do my transfer!” (Reader: She did NOT like that.)

Both the nurse and the doctor then did their best to calm me down, and ease my fears and did apologize because it was bad communication and that was not how they wanted things to be done. Then they gave me my Valium (normal for this procedure, not because I was an angry mess) and went to straighten everything out with the medications before we went back for the transfer.

This is my second transfer during Covid and I have been totally fine doing this all by myself. It’s been empowering, even! But man alive I wished I had someone there with me yesterday during all this.

They finally came back, went over everything with me, calmly, and then it was time to go back. The Valium was kicking in, thank God, so my stress levels started to come down. Once we got into the transfer room, I got to talk to the embryologist and ask about the grade and if it had changed. She said it had! It was now a 3BB!

Then it was time to have someone press an ultrasound thingy on my full bladder, super pleasant. I asked about my lining and they said it was “beautiful!” The doctor, for all her faults, was great and got that little 3BB in there, right in the sweet spot. They showed me on the monitor and you could see the little blob of what will be my baby. 

The nurse said “your baby is already really photogenic!”

I think so too.