3/16/10

A Chromosomally Sound Embryo and a Perfect (proven) Uterus is Great (but doesn’t guarantee success)

Just had my WTF with Dr. S.u.rr.ey and asked a lot of probing questions. I feel better than ever that it could just have been a bad embryo, no matter how good it looks. He mentioned a study done on embryos created from donor eggs. The finding was 30% chromosomal abnormality. Now, granted, donor eggs usually come from…ehem…”older” women (like me) who are typically with older men and sperm does have a higher abnormality rate given the man’s age. But even with that, you can probably take away a 20-25% rate of chromosomal abnormality faulted to the donor egg. Best case scenario 1 in 5 eggs from a young donor (my donor was almost 32 – not a pup exactly) are shit!

Hey, that’s all great news for me. Means my uterus is probably just fine. In fact, I told him I wanted another hysteroscopy (provided there is no downside to it). He said “I don’t think you need it and we’ll probably find nothing” but agreed it’s a great idea if it gives me peace of mind (which it would). Further, he insisted I could do it in NJ. But I told him my upcoming business trip may schedule out beautifully between CD 5-13 so I could do it on my way to/from L.A.

Thought this statistical information was interesting. This is specific to donor egg embryos, which have NOT been CGH-tested and are FET by vitrification (numbers for CGH-normal embryos or fresh donor egg embryo transfers are higher in all categories):

Embryo # at Transfer and BFP
1 – 45-50%
2 – 65-70%

Chance of Twins
1 – 2%
2 – 25%

This information was different from what I heard from Dr. G last summer during my fresh transfer, which is frustrating (his numbers for vitrification transfers were FAR more favorable).

Anyway, I will have another decision to make transfer day. One or two? I don’t know, I really don’t.

5 comments:

irrationalexuberance said...

Oh -- that's interesting info. Thanks for posting.
I went through the same question - 1 or 2 - for both my first fresh cycle and for my first FET. It was really really hard to decide, and caused a lot of agita on all fronts. Ultimately, we went with 1 both times, but only ended up with a really meager chemical pregnancy on the FET. So now I've resigned myself to 2, and am doing a fresh cycle since we only have one more frozen.

Ultimately, the question we asked was "would you rather not be pregnant or have twins?" And that helped.

Anyway, long answer, but hopefully helpful. Good luck!

Sue said...

Those really are interesting stats. Funny though b/c Dr. G has always given us the more conservative estimates...even at our CGH normal transfer of 2, I'd heard from others that our success rate was close to 85% but he said "this should work- you've got a 70% chance!!!!". I will always remember that because he was meaning to be positive and that alone almost made me cry in desperation!!!

Time to get back on the horse, I guess. I am also planning to do another cycle ASAP to get some frozen embies for future transfers and just the thought of all of that stress and hormones again is freaking me out...but I'm committed (or should be committed). Either way, I now know that going for #2 or #3 or #4 is never ever going to be as stressful as all those IVF's for #1, even if none of the future ones work. BUT, I just know that your history is not much different than mine, so it WILL work for you SOON.

Paige said...

Interesting info. So much to learn while going through this. Best of luck with the hysteroscopy and moving forward.

Phoebe said...

I'm so sorry for the bad news.

When it comes to the number of embryos to transfer, it's such a personal choice. I know for me, I'm just not a twins type of person. I have health considerations too in which I question if I could actually physically handle carrying twins. Sometimes, you don't really know what kind of person you are until you are in that particular situation. One way to look at it is how you would be able to raise twins if you ended up pregnant with them. I think you really need to think this out ahead of time instead of thinking that you'll just "deal with it". That's too vague, IMHO.

musicmakermomma said...

So glad Dr S was reassuring, FWIW. I do believe that some of the stats out there about DE are hugely inflated, and my numbers certainly bear that out!

We transferred one embryo the first 2 cycles. For all those reasons...and got a chemical and a m/c at 7 weeks.
The next cycle (FET) we put back two, and got a BFN. Then this last fresh cycle we put back two again and also BFN. Huh.

Also, just fyi, our donors were 21, 26, and 22. We definately got the worst results from the 21yo, although anything that doesn't result in a full term pg doesn't seem like great results to me!

Good luck hon!