Fifteen Percent

Welcome ICLWers!  This is my first ever ICLW, so I'm excited to meet new bloggy friends.  This blog is fairly new, so for a good idea about what's up with me until now you can check out my TTC Timeline page or read this post.

So, it looks like we're off to the races for IVF #2.  Day 3 bloodwork and ultrasound results from Friday are all good (specifics not provided, which is probably good so I can't obsessively Google them).  I'm set to start BCP on December 23rd.  I take my Cetrotide shot on December 29th and my last BCP on January 2nd.  The rest of the dates are up in the air until then.

I know I should be excited about this.  We didn't even get to egg retrieval last time, so I should be stoked that the new drug protocol (antagonist versus agonist, so no Lupron) will go better.  Instead, I just find myself feeling anxious.  I'm a worrier by nature, and right now I'm worried that this won't go any better than last time and we'll end up with two failed IVFs under our belt.  I even kind of feel like not doing it at all, since if you don't try then you can't fail.  How's that for optimism?

I should probably try to find a way to snap out of this.  But the thing is, my optimism or pessimism is directly related to the cold hard facts on the table in front of me.  And the statistics here are not good.  Doing a bit of reading the other day, I found the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS) annual report for 2010 (the most recent one I could find) online.  It gives the statistics from all Canadian registered fertility clinics (which includes mine) for that year, broken down into helpful categories like age and diagnosis.  And what is the live birth rate for women diagnosed with Diminished Ovarian Reserve (DOR), pray tell?  

Fifteen percent.

Now, a 15% chance of success sounds a whole lot more optimistic than an 85% chance of failure.  But if someone put you on one side of a highway, and told you that you had an 85% chance of getting smacked by a truck trying to cross it, how eager would you be to get to the other side?  I for one would keep my damn feet where they were, thank you very much.  And yet in the case of IVF, we're jumping into it to the tune of $9000 and our emotional stability.  Sounds like something only a crazy person would do, right?  Well, I guess that makes us super cray-cray!  I'm gonna Frogger my way across this motherfucker if it kills me.