10. The follow-up

So we had our follow-up consultation this week after our first icsi cycle failed just before Christmas.

It started badly before we even arrived, with my wife picking up a voicemail while we were driving there to say our appointment had been cancelled. Since we were only 5 minutes from arriving at the hospital I decided to carry on and at least see if we could get our appointment re-booked.

On arriving at the clinic we played innocent and the receptionist was understandably apologetic. We explained we’d had to wait a long time for our appointment after our heartbreaking disappointment before Christmas last year and had even had a previous appointment also cancelled at last minute. I also pointed out that we’d been booked in with a different consultant who we’d never met and would feel more comfortable seeing our regular consultant. She made some calls and eventually our regular consultant came out in between patients to say he would stay late and fit us in before he left; such an understanding and compassionate man and quite unexpected. We’d just hoped to get a rescheduled appointment as soon as possible.

He went through the positives: they’d collected more eggs than they had expected and all the mature eggs had survived the icsi injection process.

We already knew most of the negatives: poor sperm quality and very low sperm count, plus my wife’s low ovarian reserve for her age at 32 (amh about 3.2 if that means anything to anyone). What we didn’t know before was the Embryologist observed the eggs they collected were darker than normal, which is apparently an indicator of poor quality.

So now we have to see the Embryologist next week to discuss whether there’s anything they can do to help improve the egg quality or whether it’s even worth trying again!!!

So we’d kinda naively gone into the appointment assuming that they would just tell us when we could start our second cycle, but came out not knowing if there’s even going to be a second chance.

Having also lost my grandma at the start of this week now feeling incredibly low at this point and next week’s consult with the professor of embryology can’t come soon enough.