IVF Cycle 1, Day 7 —You Never Know

IVF This Noise
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

The women who have undergone IVF always tell you: you never know.

You never know if a treatment is going to be effective or not.

You never know if those embryos are going to grow or not

You never know if those embryos will decide to stick or not.

It’s a test for parenthood and perhaps a metaphor for life, of course, and I think this is a mantra meant to soothe, but for me it just feels like a big cloudy gray area. I accept gray in people: their emotions, their motivations; I accept it in myself, too: feelings are inescapably gray. I understand the reasons why people half-ass their work on projects (they’re not excited about the project or the people they have to work with) or children only try the tiniest bite of a new food (they want control over their own destinies and also they want chicken nuggets).

But in life, when taking action, I do not traffic in gray: I am black or white. Do, or do not; there is no try.

When I want something, I want it now. This is where it gets tricky when it comes to biological processes: though I should know it by now—and should expect it from my body, given its track record—my body is never going to do what I want it to do.

True to form, this morning, my doctor, in very measured terms, said that my ovarian follicles are not producing as many eggs as they had hoped. I have a few follicles that are very motivated on either side, a few that are kinda middling and might be ready by the weekend, and then the remainder of who are like, “yeah, man, naw, catch me next month maybe.” These would no doubt grow into layabout children who don’t make their beds and want to go to a college where they don’t actually give grades.

The goal from the outset was to get 20ish decent eggs that could produce 10–15 embryos, of which we might have 5–8 that would be “high quality” and worth implanting at all. Further, numbers like this would free me up to be done with this harvesting process for good: start out with a decently sized bunch of keepers so that we can try (and fail) and try (and succeed) to a reasonable degree. Anything less than five keepers and we’ll probably want to do this harvesting stuff again because to have a high Keeper Ratio, you need to start off with a pretty big pool of possibles.

So this news isn’t damning: we will roll with whatever happens as best we can, and you never know what will happen in the dark environs of my body in the next 48–72 hours.

IVF This Noise

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