catching you up a bit...

I guess it's probably time to put some of this IVF stuff in context. If this thing is going to be anything more than purely venting, then a post like the last one needs a little background. Let's start at the beginning.

Firstly, a quick Too Much Information warning for the squeemish :)

Male Factor Infertility, or MFI for short. That's what I've got. As is usual with such things, there is no one type and no one cause. There are a whole swag of different types. I have several of them. I have Oligospermia, which is basically a fancy way of saying low sperm count. Then there is the tetrazoospermia, which relates to the motility or swimming ability of the sperm. I also experience a high abnormal forms ratio, which means that there are relatively few of my sperm which are properly developed, even before the other matters have their effect.

As a final whammy - and this is the bit my doctor describes as "clinically significant" - my body produces antibodies against my own sperm. Don't ask me why, but the upshot of this is that if and when any of them finally reach an ova, they can't stick to it while they burrow in.

About six months or so after C and I started trying to conceive (ttc is the jargon, I've learnt!) we started to suspect something might not be right. C had always felt she had some sort of a problem. Prior to the coeliac diagnosis she'd much of the five or so years before that vomiting fairly regularly. This she felt had limited the effectiveness of her oral contraceptive regime over that time. Also, she had never had a single scare in ten years or so of sexual activity and her menstrual cycle wasn't particularly regular.

All things considered, some problem sounded likely, so we went off to the doctor. Sure enough she hadn't been ovulating, possibly for quite a long time. The doc gave her some stuff which seemed to do the trick. A couple of months after that I thought I'd go along and get myself tested, more or less just to dot the i's and cross the t's. After all, we'd found and fixed the problem. But that wasn't the case at all. The diagnosis came back and the rest is history.

There are a few key milestones in an IVF cycle. Broadly there is the harvest, where they draw the ova from the female. There's the fertilisation, which is kind of self explanatory. Although there is a little more to it in terms of the continuing development of the zygote in the dish. And there is the transfer of an embryo back into the female. From there it all becomes essentially the same as a natural conception, in terms of pregnancy, miscarriage etc.

Before the harvest they boost the ovulation cycle of the female to try to get just the right number of ova. If they get too many the hormone levels can be dangerous to the female and too few means its not worth the hassle of harvesting.

Our first cycle C hadn't grown enough ova, so they pulled the plug.

Second time around they changed the mix a bit and we got a harvest. They didn't get as many as they might've liked - only four ova - but it turned out that was enough. All four fertilised into embryoes and they transferred one fresh embryo back into C. That one didn't take.

A month or two later they went to thaw a couple of frozen embryoes to try again. They successfully thawed two, while one of the remaining embryoes failed to develop any further. They transferred those two thawed embryoes. One failed to take, but the other was successful. Unfortunately we miscarried that pregnancy at about the six week mark.

So, that's where we're up to. I hope that puts the earlier posts in context!