A Failed IVF Caused by Non viable Eggs

It is quite difficult when you have always assumed you would have children, to then find out that you need some form of treatment in order to conceive. But it shifts the ground from under you when even that treatment fails. In the cases, it is only the grace of God and the reactions of the people around you to stabilize you. I thank God for my faith, for the person He has made me to be, and for the man I chose to go through life with.

I went in to the egg retrieval realistic but hopeful. At the end, Atala drove us back and we began to wait for the doctor's call that will tell us how it went and what the next steps were.

But no matter how you think you're prepared for the worst, some times the reality knocks you for six.

The call was not a happy one. The follicles they had retrieved had no mature eggs in them and the doctor was just as dismayed as we were. He wanted to give it till the next day to see if any would develop to a stage they could use it. They didn't, and that evening the IVF treatment cycle had to be cancelled.

It was a tough day, very rough. I cried at the doctor's office as he broke the news. He was quite honest. The failed IVF cycle had left him scratching his head. Non-viable eggs wasn't something that happened often, and it made no sense to him.

You see, he and his nurses had continuously reviewed my hormone treatment every step of the way. I had gone in every day so they could monitor the development of the eggs and they had used the results of the tests to adjust the medicine doses accordingly. By the time of the egg retrieval, everything had been looking good. The follicles were of a good size and all the hormones were within the normal ranges.

The doctor insisted they had done everything they could and as we reviewed the cycle, Atala and I think we did a good job on our side too. We had done everything as required and had been praying too. So what had happened? It was just confusion.

Since then, I have looked up some of the common reasons for non-viable eggs being retrieved at IVF and some are,

a) Not injecting the trigger medicine that allows them to retrieve the egg;
b) Making mistakes while injecting the medicine, usually by using too little or having some leak out;
c) When the doctor uses a poor quality of the trigger or
d) When the person doing the egg retrieval does it wrongly.

I don't think any of these was the case with us. But for days afterwords I kept on thinking about it. Did we miss taking a dose on time? Did we not take enough, etc? It took a while and prayers to regain my peace, but regain it I did.

The doctor encouraged us to take some months off to gather ourselves and decide the next steps. He would review the treatment that I had received and see if he could justify another IVF attempt and try to come up with a tweaked protocol that would give us more success.

In January, I had started playing with the idea of blogging about my IVF experience after the fact, while hoping I would have a "testimony" to share. But this had been a teaching period for me too. Not all stories have to be testimonies, and there is no one size fits all testimony.

But easier said than done, even though Atala knew and approved with my plans to share, it took me another 6 months to come to a head space where I was strong enough to share. And I am glad I did. And for your support and prayers, thank you :)