Excited and Closure

Well, although we continue Mission: Kill The Rats at our house, we do have some more appropriate DE news.

First, we met with our old clinic for the post-mortem for the failed thawing of the frozen eggs. The one thing I did NOT want to happen is for them to say "Well, this sort of thing just happens and successfully thawing frozen eggs is not very likely anyway." Therefore, I went in with the stats from the donating clinic and a couple of articles from Fertility & Sterility and Science.

Although they did imply that "this sort of thing just happens", they did indirectly admit that they had had a learning curve on freezing and thawing embryos and that likely this was the same sort of thing. No one said that directly (God forbid!), but there was an undercurrent of that sentiment. Also, both the RE and the embryologist seemed surprised and upset that this happened. Actually, the embyrologist seemed upset. The RE seemed more "circumspect."

I really, really didn't want to go in and be all "YOU'RE INCOMPETENT!" but clearly mistakes were made. The RE tried hard to close ranks saying "this sort of thing happens" and "maybe there was a difference in the water purification", but the embryologist seemed more upset that this was a complete and abject failure. We tried to tell them that we could have handled not getting pg, but not even getting a try was not cool.

In any case, the bottom line is that we are being refunded the all the money for the embryologist and transfer part of the cycle. We won't get our money back for the services already provided (HSG, trial transfer, medications, etc), but that seems absolutely fine. That refund turns out to be a significant chunk of change and will really help for this next cycle.

Which we are doing elsewhere. I've already mentioned which clinic we're using, but I think I'm going to refrain from doing it again, just to give everyone a little bit more privacy. That said, I've already had a phone meeting with the RE and the DE coordinator. I have everyone's email addresses and private phone numbers. (WOW!) I also have assurances that they are going to make sure I have a baby to take home with me.

Let me reiterate the stats: 80-85% success rates on DE with an 80% chance of two blastocysts and frosties with each cycle. Their FET success rates are also about 70%! That's higher than even my current clinic's fresh cycle success rates.

So here is an example that makes me feel like this is the right place for us to be: every single person, from the original intake person to the RE to the DE coordinator knows about us and the frozen egg debacle. Everyone brought it up first and said something kind about it. Every. Single. Person. At the old clinic, I had to correct everyone I dealt with (except my RE and his main nurse) that I was NOT doing frozen embryo but frozen eggs. Even the doctors at my monitoring visits looked at me with a blank face when I tried to tell explain what I was doing.

I also feel like at this new clinic their main goal is to make sure I have a baby. And they really think they can do it. I told the DE coordinator today that I would love to have twins and she said "Well, let's just see if we can get you twins." That statement would never be allowed at my old clinic.

Onward and upward and closer to bringing our child(ren) home.