I'm hoping for advice/ideas/questions to ask my RE next week when at our appointment to regroup after 4 consecutive failed FETs. Many of you already know our story, but just to recap...
As some background, I'm 40 years old and my husband 32. We struggled for a year with infertility in 2015/2016 and quickly moved on to IVF given my age at the time (38). I had never previously been pregnant or had any losses.
Our egg retrieval yielded 10 embryos. We transferred 1 and sent 9 to the freezer. We were not recommended for PGS testing at that time as we hadn't had any losses. We were lucky enough to have success on that 1st fresh transfer and now have an adorable daughter who will be 2 in February.
In Feb 2018, we switched to NT/NP. My doctor had wanted me to wait a full year before getting pregnant again as I had a difficult pregnancy complicated by severe preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome. We did the deed literally one time on March 12 and became pregnant the old fashioned way, something we were never expecting given that we needed IVF to conceive previously.
Unfortunately we later discovered that baby had tremendous health issues and a poor prognosis and opted for a medical termination in May 2018 at 12w6d. It was heartbreaking for us given the struggles we've had trying to conceive. Being gifted with a natural pregnancy, only to have her taken from us before we ever met her.
Unfortunately the D&C was complicated by retained tissue which lead to elevated HCG levels and a period that didn't return until over 16 weeks post-procedure. I underwent a failed round of methotrexate during that process as well, but things ended passing on their own.
Desperately wanting to avoid another medical termination (the hardest thing I've ever endured in my life), we opted to PGS test our 9 frozen embryos. 6 were normal, 3 abnormal. We received that great news in August 2018.
Once my cycle finally returned, we moved forward transfers:
Sept 2018: Natural (unmedicated FET #1, 1 PGS-normal --> Negative
Oct 2018: Natural (unmedicated FET #2, 1 PGS-normal--> Negative
Nov 2018: Took a cycle off to do a saline sonogram to look for scar tissue from the D&C, it was normal
Dec 2018: Medicated FET#3, 1 PGS-normal--> Negative
Jan 2019: Medicated FET#4, 1 PGS-normal --> Testing negative at home at 6dp5dt, beta on 1/17, but presumably negative.
After 4 failed FETs on PGS normal embryos, we meet criteria for "recurrent implantation failure." On our very first transfer that resulted in our daughter, they gave us a 30% chance of success, and it worked. With each PGS-normal transfer, we supposedly have a 70% chance of success on each transfer, yet here we are with 4 failures.
30% x 30% x 30% x 30% = 0.81% chance that we should be where we are.
So, despite still being in our 2WW, I've asked for a sit down appointment with our RE which is scheduled for 1/22. We only have 2 embryos left at this point, and I'm afraid we may need to do another retrieval at this rate if we just keep going and don't try something different.
I'm usually all about evidenced-based approaches, but since we are now beating all of the odds in a bad way and are in rare territory, I'm hoping to enlist suggestions/experiences from others. Not asking for medical advice, just asking for thought on what to discuss with my RE at this appointment.
If you read all of that, thank you so much.