Not meant to be...

It seems as if it is just not meant to be...again....

Am so sad at the nothingness you feel when it fails...the empty, hollowness of disappointment.

It gets worse with every failed cycle. It's that space between possibility and despair - the widest cavernous space of sadness. Sadness at having the very vital purpose of being a woman on this planet reduced to a game of chance. Sadness at wasting so much vital energy, money and emotion on holding hope in your heart. Sadness at the lost possibility that it could just have worked. This time.

But it didn't.

Embie is still only a 5 cell and seems too slow to be viable. Unless a miracle happens, transfer is cancelled again. Prof wants to meet with us tomorrow to discuss a new plan. I know he is going to say we can either carry on trying with my own eggs on the off chance we get lucky even though this is a remote possibility, otherwise we can move into a higher chance of success next with donor eggs now...

Somewhere along this 12 year journey...we have gone from conceiving a baby twice to a serious decline in egg quality.... This makes it even harder to accept. Why didn't we do IVF 5 years ago when we still had a chance? But, there is no point in looking back.

Back to the beginning, when I had no idea this is what lay in store for me....I always believed I would be a mother of at least two by 35. I always thought I would be a good mother and that embracing non-conditional love and welcoming responsibility would come naturally to me. So many projects have been shelved as I was waiting for a child to share it with.

I want to believe it is still possible. But today, it still seems so far away.

Time out

My worst nightmare since starting out this journey 11 years ago, is starting to happen. Even my FS's are starting to give up on me. Yes. The words I hoped I would never have to listen to were said this morning. Poor egg quality.

My 36 year old eggs seem to be way older than their years. The Prof is on a conference and Dr S has been looking after me this cycle. He is puzzled as I have been pregnant with two ectopics (both would have been viable pregnancies if in my uterus) and with the first IVF (later m/c). But even on the first IVF my embryo quality was not great. In the past two cycles, I have only produced grade 2 and 3 embryos - slow developing and haven't even grown past a 7 cell on day 6. He feels this means that my egg quality has gone downhill fast, and I face the odds as not only am I a poor responder, now my egg quality doesn't look that hot at all.

This means that I could do cycle after cycle, getting only 2 or 3 eggs of poor quality and hope each time that perhaps, just maybe one good one squeezes through. Just the path I was hoping wouldn't be mine. He started chatting about egg donors and even adoption. I so wanted our baby - you all know what I mean - my eyes, my toes. I keep thinking about the ectopics and how close we got. And how unfair it all is. Just because of an infection I got when I was 19 resulted in damaged tubes that cannot carry an embryo to it's resting place. Now because of all the wasted time trying, my eggs seem to be on a time out.

How do you give up your DNA? How do I go down that road now? How do I accept that I could never say "you look like me when I was small"?

I am not sure what to do now. Maybe try one or two more cycles next year? Dr S also suggested that we do very low stims and monitor progress and perhaps cancel before retrieval if follicle count not good. But he agrees the odds are against us and suggests we think through all the options.

For now, I will rest my weary mind and punctured body.