The plan

Here’s what’s on the agenda for October:

1) Quit my job because it is sucking the life out of me.
2) Plan the twins’ 3rd birthday party.
3) Attempt to get pregnant.

That’s right, I’m going to reach new heights of oversharing and chronicle our attempt to conceive in my blog. After consultation with Greg, we agreed that I would not post any entries about this in my main blog (that our friends and family know about) until after everything was done and we were ready to announce the results publicly (good or bad). So I started writing these entries but not posting them. That was getting too confusing for me, so now I'm going to post all the TTC (trying to conceive) entries in this new new super-secret blog which I will link or merge with my main blog if and when it's appropriate.

When most couples decide to try for another baby, they might buy a bottle of wine and plan a romantic weekend away. For us infertiles, we whip out our credit card and set up an injection centre in the bathroom. We have 3 embryos in cryogenic storage at our fertility clinic in Burnaby. We are going to unthaw and transfer these embryos (one at a time!) into my uterus in hope of adding to our family. Well actually this will be done by a team of highly qualified reproductive endocrinologists and embryologists. Greg and I will just be doing the hoping and praying part.

Why?

Why try again you may ask? Wouldn't that be pushing our luck considering how fortunate we were last time around to have the twins? And hey, aren't I always complaining about how overwhelmed and stressed out I am balancing work and family? Would I really want to add another child into the mix?

Yes, this may be a crazy bad idea but Greg and I would still absolutely love to have another baby. The twins are a lot of work and sometimes they drive us nuts, but they are also an absolute joy. And I feel like somehow there is supposed to be another member of our family and we need to give him/her a chance to join the insanity. Also, with twins, everything goes by so fast: all the milestones and the adorable baby stuff. I so wish I could do it again.

The odds of success:

I'm not going to quote the success rates and statistics for a frozen embryo transfer (FET) because they're actually pretty discouraging. FET rates are always lower than a fresh IVF cycle because we have already transferred the 2 best embryos of the bunch and the remaining ones are of lesser quality and may not be viable. As info for my non-infertile friends: even with regular people, only about half of fertilized eggs have the potential to become babies, the remainder have genetic abnormalities which will cause the embryo to stop growing in the first couple of weeks. This rate gets even worse as a woman gets older (ie over 35). This is part of the reason that even fertile people don't get pregnant every month that they try.

Our fertility doctor (aka reproductive endocrinologist or RE) has given us a 30% chance of this working. Namely that if we thawed and transferred all 3 embryos, we have a 30% chance of having one baby. That's certainly good enough odds for us to take the chance.

Let the fun begin!