Update and apologies.

So I haven't gotten off to a great start, blogwise. I'm feeling a little... burned out? I feel like I'm just rehashing my pile of failures. Meanwhile, many, many women on my blogroll have recently become pregnant. So my first apology is that I've been absent from my blog, and my second is that I've been absent from yours. I want to be supportive, but I'm just in a place where I'm not sure I can read about so many others' successes.

As for my update- I talked to Dr. Z finally yesterday. (We had a "phone appt" at 2:45 but he didn't call until 3:30.) Let me start by saying that, while he didn't directly express this to me, Dr. Z is pissed. I could tell that he is not happy with with the Dr. my insurance company employs to consult on these decisions. He is not at all pleased that they are making us test and use the frozen embryos before we can attempt a new cycle. I think a big part of that comes from the fact that we've now been doing this for close to a year and a half and he feels bad about that...

Two things I am trying to keep in mind, though. 1) We are so lucky to have insurance cover this at all and 2) Dr. Z said that, regardless of the outcome of this cycle, it will definitely give us "genetic knowledge" of what the outcome of our previous cycle was in terms of how the inversion affected the embryos we have.

So, now to the nitty gritty.

Dr. Z will thaw all nine frozen embryos and each will have PGD. Any embryos that “survive” both the thaw and the biopsy will now be blastocysts. The hope is to transfer two blastocysts. If there are any additional blastocysts that survive and are high enough quality, those can be frozen too.

When he realized on what the insurance doc was insisting, Dr. Z a went back to look at other cases of PGD on frozen embryos at my clinic (I don't know if it was just for info or because he was trying to persuade the insurance company not to make us do it... my feeling is that it is the latter). He found 11 cases, and two of them resulted in pregnancy.

I asked if the gap between fresh PGD and frozen PGD cycles was greater than the gap between regular fresh IVF cycles and regular frozen IVF cycles (which, as we all know, already has a lower success rate for frozen) and he said definitely because there is already the possibility that thawed embryos won’t grow, and that the testing increases that chance.

So... It's a strange place to be in. I am certainly glad I won't be shooting up this cycle, and glad that we will be doing this immediately, where a fresh cycle takes so much longer. BUT... it doesn't seem like a very good shot. Kind of like the clomid cycle where we were away so we couldn't do an IUI but "tried" on our own. Ha.

Expecting CD1 around 1/13 (unless this cycle is not back to normal) and we'll go from there. If it's on time, I would expect the transfer to be around 1/30.