TTC, 9 IVF cycles and looking for the light

[kitty.smith33]

We need your help:

Our background: 4 years trying to conceive. Age: 34 wife, 37 husband, 1st marriage. No miscarriages, pregnancies or children. No known illnesses except Hypothyroid with husband (TSH=36). Wife's blood tests for hormone levels – normal. Endometrium - OK

What we did so far: 3 IUI treatments. 9 IVF cycles. 4-5 amp. of different drugs for ovaries stimulation. In all cycles 4-5 eggs were collected, 75%-100% fertilization rate (reg. IVF & ICSI). After 72 hours transfer in all cycles of 3 embryos size: 4-8 cells (twice with assisted hatching, AHA). One chemical pregnancy in the first IVF treatment. 1 IVF with donor's sperm.

Husband sperm specification: Volume: 1.7 ml / Mobile: 60% after 1 hour / Concentration: 55-75 million/ml / Morphology: normal forms 11-15% and once 3%

Looking into the future: I've started taking Chinese med for "heating" the uterus. We are considering natural IVF cycle or IVM to see if the drugs are causing embryos implementation in the uterus to fail.

Do you know any other new treatment or advice we can use ?

[wishfull27]

Hi Kitty - whilst I can not help you with the technical stuff I would just say how much I admire you and DH and your perseverence and strngth - am not sure I would be able to cope with 9BFN and the associated trauma - hope you get the answers you are looking for

love and sticky baby dust

Carolyn x

[Ghost]

I think the IVM is a great idea. Those "drugs" may indeed be hurting the endometrial receptivity.

Consider doing it multiple times to build up a substantial number of eggs before proceeding with a transfer. If you're only producing a few each time, you'll still need multiple retrievals to have a good chance, especially with IVM.

Good luck.

[michu]

We need your help:

Our background: 4 years trying to conceive. Age: 34 wife, 37 husband, 1st marriage. No miscarriages, pregnancies or children. No known illnesses except Hypothyroid with husband (TSH=36). Wife's blood tests for hormone levels – normal. Endometrium - OK

What we did so far: 3 IUI treatments. 9 IVF cycles. 4-5 amp. of different drugs for ovaries stimulation. In all cycles 4-5 eggs were collected, 75%-100% fertilization rate (reg. IVF & ICSI). After 72 hours transfer in all cycles of 3 embryos size: 4-8 cells (twice with assisted hatching, AHA). One chemical pregnancy in the first IVF treatment. 1 IVF with donor's sperm.

Husband sperm specification: Volume: 1.7 ml / Mobile: 60% after 1 hour / Concentration: 55-75 million/ml / Morphology: normal forms 11-15% and once 3%

Looking into the future: I've started taking Chinese med for "heating" the uterus. We are considering natural IVF cycle or IVM to see if the drugs are causing embryos implementation in the uterus to fail.

Do you know any other new treatment or advice we can use ?

Although you are still young, after so many IVF with no results the best option is egg donation, and /or to preform PGD (preimpation genetic diagnosis) to assure the embryos are cromosomically adecuate. Other causes for IVF failure are sperm DNA fragmentation, and in these cases TESE sperm retrieval or sperm donation shoud be performed
Try this wb site argentinafertilityservices.com and good luck!!

[kellym]

Kitty.Smith33,

I want to wish you the best of luck. We have a similar history in that it took 9 attempts to finally get pregnant - but we finally are with twins! I am 35 now but started when I was 32 - it was male factor and we were told that it should be easy for us to get pregnant - well we proved them wrong.

We did all the testing you did, but we also did the sperm dna fragmentation test which found that in addition to my DH's sperm having low count, morphology and motility it also was highly fragmented - apparently that could have been the explanation why our otherwise great looking embryos weren't working. I also had 2 chemical pregnancies which I was told was a good thing because at least I could get pregnant.

We got to the point when we just wanted our babies so we actually chose to go to donor eggs - it worked the first time. But we felt like we had exhausted most possibilities. We did cycles where we just froze all embryos so that they could be transfered into a natural cycle, we did a staged transfer where we transferred embryos 2 days apart to see whether my endometrium window was 'not the norm', we tried donor sperm, we transferred 3 days embies and 5 day embies... we seemed to try everything but in the end it seemed like changing the eggs was the solution.

Anyway, all the best to you and DH.
Kelly

[Tris]

Hey kitty.smith33...DONT WORRY! A girl at my clinic did so many IVF´s more than 5 and got pg eventually....look at Brooke Shields, just read about her somewhere in the web, and she had 9 IVF´s which finally resulted to a healthy child. Many say after so long, you should consider egg donation as kellym did. In my clinic a 47 year old woman tried IVF many times when she was younger-in her late 30´s and she just gave birth 3 weeks ago to twins (1 girl +1 boy) via egg donation!! - imagine all the other good stories out there we dont know about. So theres HOPE girl..... even if the experience is just too much for us to take sometimes, JUST DONT GIVE UP and youll get there (Im certain the science is being improved as we speak)

[kitty.smith33]

First of all, I would REALLY like to THANK you all – you gave me new hope and directions to explore. You did so much more than you can imagine!!!

My DH & me will go for PGD and sperm DNA fragmentation tests as last diagnostic resort and based on the results decide if to try another IVF cycle or move on to donors.