Transfer day, or Last Chance at the OK Corral

Well. Today was embryo transfer and it's a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that we transfered back a single four-celled embryo. We haven't seen a four-celled embryo since the cycle that gave us Small Boy. So yay! Four cells on day two. You go, little embryo.

Bad news is that it took a lot to get that embryo. You know how R and I called our frozen ones our "hockey team?" Well, in keeping with the analogy it appears our team bus got rammed by a tractor-trailer on the way to the big game. Up until now we've defrosted two fertilized eggs (no, not embryos, fertilized eggs as I have recently come to understand) per transfer; one has looked good enough to transfer and the second has ultimately stopped dividing - i.e, it died. So the two failed FETs have cost us four fertilized eggs. Today's cost us six. Our last six, for those of you not keeping track at home (what, you're not keeping track?). Four apparantly looked like crap from the get-go, one looks so-so and we're supposed to call the lab tomorrow to see if it survived long enough to re-freeze, and one divided to the four-cell stage and is now floating in the vastness of my uterus looking for a wall (Left! Turn left!). So at best, there will be one embryo tomorrow instead of the four I always delusionally imagined there would be.

I said in this post that this may well be our last FET regardless of the outcome, but I never imagined this particular outcome; it simply never occured to me that we'd hit a cycle in which we blew through six fertilized eggs to transfer one. (It's slowly dawning on me that a whole lot of things never occurred to me. The remarkable first time out of the gate Small Boy succcess seems to have left me overly optimistic and rather uninformed. As a result I've hit a steep learning curve these past two weeks, and it has not been fun. But at least I don't feel like an infertility fraud anymore.) I never imagined not having the choice; in that same post I wrote about how important it is to me to feel that I have some choice in this, some control, that stopping even though we still had embryos - excuse me, fertilized eggs - was an important part of my ability to feel content - pleased and delighted, even - with the shape of my family. Now that option, always a selfish option, I admit, may not be there; we'll know tomorrow morning what happened to Half-a-Chance. And we'll know in two weeks what happened to Last Chance.

I need to think about how I feel about all of this. I am angry, surely, that the Swiss laws have put us through a roller-coaster that we would have avoided in the States. We would have known from the start that we really only had 2 or 3 embryos at best to work with in a FET; we wouldn't have undergone procedures for which there was no hope in the first place. Just two days in the lab would have saved us a whole lot of emotional energy, to say nothing of time and money. I know the logic behind the Swiss laws, logic with which R and I happen to disagree, and that's a topic for a post sometime. I'm too angry right now to write it, and I don't want to be angry. It's a beautiful early spring day here at the foot of the Swiss Alps, and there is a four-celled embryo in my uterus, and I just want to try to think about that today.

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I saw a pregnant woman, heavily pregnant, outside the clinic as I was walking in for the transfer this morning. I saw a pregnant woman at the clinic the day of the Small Boy transfer, too.