I have been meaning to write an update, but it has been a long while. So here we are! It's egg donor time. After a long wait for our previous donor, who fell through, we found a donor we loved at a different clinic. Thankfully, things have gone relatively quickly through this process with this clinic. We selected our donor at the beginning of November, got all the paperwork done, wrote some very large checks, and our donor had her egg retrieval at the end of January.

They were going to start our transfer cycle after we met with our doctor to discuss the results of the embryo testing, but I nudged them and said, why do we have to wait? We know we have good embryos. So I was able to get them to start the cycle a month sooner. We had our embryo transfer on March 4th.

A note about navigating all this stuff: I have not found that there is any support or much help at all from fertility clinics. I was glad that I was familiar with the IVF process from three rounds at the previous clinic, which provided more guidance and information than this one. I knew that a "modified natural cycle," rather than a "medicated cycle" with more hormones worked well for me previously, and I requested that. Being familiar with the process and knowing what needed to happen made me able to push things along. If I had not had that, there would have been at least another month of waiting before our transfer.

I feel the urge to rant every time I think about this, but there is just so little support or help from these clinics. It feels like a struggle to accomplish the next step every time, and it is draining and lonely. That doesn't even include the financial side, which is also very unhelpful. I am billing insurance for our donor cycle currently, because the fertility clinic will not bill insurance for anything donor related and they seem so shocked and bewildered at us having any fertility coverage for donor IVF. They struggled to create the right receipts to use my husband's fertility benefits. Ridiculous.

I think the frustration of the paperwork and associated hassles feel more real to me right now than the fact that the transfer worked and I'm pregnant. That feels wild and strange and abstract. It's a fact that I know, but I don't fully feel, because I still feel like me.

So here are the details: our sweet donor has wildly over-achieving ovaries, and they retrieved 63 eggs. What!? Crazy. Her previous two cycles retrieved around 30, which is a lot, so that's more like what I expected. Of those, 54 eggs fertilized and 20 made it to blastocyst. We had them PGT tested, which wasn't really necessary, but was good for our own peace of mind after our previous losses. 1 was aneuploid and 1 was mosaic, so we had 18 healthy frozen embryos. Crazy! That is so many embryos, jeez. But okay!

So we transferred one embryo and it stuck. It is early, but the HCG blood tests looked great. HCG of 291, 9 days past transfer, and 643, 11 days past transfer. Now I just have to cool my jets until 7 weeks when I get a scan to make sure all looks good. After that, there will be another scan at 9 1/2 weeks, and then I'll graduate to a regular OB. It's only 5 1/2 weeks now, so I will be doing things one day at a time till we get to that point.

They have the sex (or is it gender?) of the embryos recorded, but we don't know what it is, for the one they transferred or the others still frozen. I may ask to find out eventually, but I don't know if I'm quite ready for that information. We'll see.

This is great news, but I keep trying to write some thoughts and be a functional person, and it isn't working.

This pregnancy is more sassy than the previous ones, I guess. I feel queasy and tired. I slept for 3 hours this afternoon. I would like to be a functional person who can do things other than nap, but I guess we'll just see how it goes. On the one hand it isn't great, but on the other, it is a reminder that something is happening. I am happy to be here, and feeling hopeful.