Our journey to parenthood still feels surreal. Infertility is a rollercoaster that you don’t want to be on, taking you slowly up each hill and barreling you down, only to climb another. Initially when my husband and I started trying to grow our family, we “didn’t stress” (which ended up being the most common and unwelcome piece of advice offered by well-meaning friends). When we didn’t get pregnant after a few months of trying, I tried not to worry even though I was desperately afraid that something was wrong.
After countless ovulation strips, trying to get my husband to eat walnuts, doing fertility acupuncture and scheduling intimacy around my cycle, we finally sought out assistance from Olive Fertility. Our infertility was deemed unexplained. I had surgery to investigate my tubes, which turned out to not be an issue. Shortly after, my husband and I decided that IVF was the best choice for us. When we began the IVF process, I thought “finally, this is a real chance to have our baby”.
The biggest lesson I think I learnt was to manage my expectations and to just focus on getting from one step of the process to the next. After a successful egg retrieval, we ended up with 7 fertilized embryos. They all grew to day 3 and I had high hopes as we awaited our day 5 call from the lab. However, a call didn’t come from the lab, but instead our doctor. She informed us that 6 of the 7 embryos had stopped growing completely and that there was one that we would wait one more night to see if there was sufficient growth to biopsy and freeze. My heart dropped. I didn’t know what that meant for us, it felt as though our dream was crushed. But the next day, we received a call letting us know that this one embryo has grown, been biopsied for genetic testing and frozen. This embryo turned out to be genetically normal and after an ERA cycle to optimize the success of a transfer, we did our embryo transfer on March 16th, 2020, just as a global pandemic was starting.
To say that I was terrified that this wouldn’t work is an understatement. For about 2 weeks I essentially held my breath as we waited to find out if we were pregnant. Well, I am happy to say that we now have an almost 5 month old beautiful, happy, healthy baby boy. Our one embryo, our one chance, our one love.
#1in6. We will forever be grateful for Olive Fertility.
