After our second failure last year I posted on the general board and had some really helpful suggestions, so here I am again looking for further input.
Here is a brief summary of our history:
- I am 38, dh is now 40, we have been trying to conceive for 6+ years, and have now done 3 IVF cycles in the last 3 years, BFN's each time and nothing to freeze. Our initial diagnosis was male factor (motility not great, very low count and poor morphology) so we went straight to IVF with ICSI. We've had karyotyping done - it came back normal. All tests on me have always come back in the normal range and I respond well to the drugs and have had a good lining each time.
- My first two cycles were at a clinic here in Canada - one agonist one antagonist, in both cases I responded well to the drugs, retrieved a good number of eggs (15 and 12) had decent fertilisation (11 and 7) but then quality became a problem and while we had 2 good embryos to transfer the first time and 3 fair the second time, the rest were fragmented/multinucleated/arrested. In both cases I was on prometrium suppositories and AF came 9dpt.
- We then did a consult with Cornell and decided to cycle there. The cycle appeared more promising, but still failed. This time we got 17 eggs, 11 of which were mature and 10 fertilized. We did co-culture and with this and the Cornell lab we had better quality overall and we put back 3 embryos (grade 2), a 10, 7 and 6 cell. While nothing froze, it appeared that the other embryos were better than previously. I was on PIO this time and made it to the beta. However, it was another BFN.
It's just devastating. It was a hard decision to take the step to cycle in NY and pay twice as much for the cycle overall, but we thought it was worth pulling out all the stops to see if it would help with quality. Right now we are both feeling so sad and drained and are feeling that we just can't go through this again. We pay out of pocket for everything, so that's hard, but worse than that is living with the hope throughout a cycle and then just having it dashed. At first it appeared that MF was the issue, and then embryo quality raised the question of egg quality issues, but we had better quality with Cornell. I know it may never be possible to get answers, but I'm looking for ideas for what else we can test/explore. I feel like I need to try and at least rule some issues out so that I don't spend years wondering if that might have been the problem...
Any suggestions for what we could try?
I'm thinking that it may be worth having a laparoscopy and hysteroscopy (neither of which I've ever had). I'm also wondering about immune testing, although I've never had a m/c I wonder if lack of implantation can be caused by immune issues too? I believe there are other tests we can do on my husband as well (syoungihmm dna fragmentation or something?). I don't think pgd or cgh are an option for us since our embryos do not appear to make it past 3 days.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts/suggestions
Debbie