Capable

Today I was capable. I dragged my behind to another egg retrieval, the most seemingly hopeless one yet. From getting the news mid-baseline-appointment that we'd lost all my embryos from the previous cycle and having my doctor suggest we cancel this cycle due to poor initial indicators, to having some last minute rallying of the follicles only for hope to be dashed by dropping estradiol levels forcing me into a premature retrieval, all while bearing the news of this past week's election results, I'm amazed I rode the emotional rollercoaster all the way into today's surgery. With a heavy heart, I negotiated special terms to today's retrieval to cut our losses by electing not to fertilize (and save on the out-of-pocket costs) if we retrieved fewer than five mature eggs. I wasn't finding much hope to hold onto.

Having awoken at 3am today, I peaced out of our condo around 4:30am and walked all the way to the clinic just because I couldn't bear waiting around anymore. The universe did its best to cheer me on with an inspirational sign in the window of a car parked around the border of Emeryville and Oakland telling me I was capable of more than I know. Shout out to the random car owner who felt folks might need a cheerleader. After a quick pre-sunrise tour around Lake Merritt, I headed into my clinic to face the music.

What followed was confusing and hopeful and hard to digest. We got eleven eggs, ten of which were mature. That's good, really good by my body's standards. I don't trust it. There have been too many dashed hopes and disappointments this cycle for any of this to make sense. But I was capable of making it through today, and I'll get up tomorrow, and in three days I'll begin priming for cycle number 7.

Cycle 6: heavy on the heaviness, light on the hope, but we made it through.

Civic duty: check

Following along with the blog this year, you'd be forgiven if you thought my non-work life consisted of little more than doctor's visits, timed injections, operating room appointments, pubmed searches, and anxious waiting. Indeed it's been hard at times to live outside the scope of my fertility journey. But occasionally I still enjoy, or at least remember, to be a normal human being, like last weekend when Nico and I did our part to postpone stop the impeding collapse of American democracy, this time with two voices instead of just one thanks to Nico's naturalization!

Election 2024, well underway.

Now to try and breathe easy as a woman banking embryos in a world where Republicans are out to outlaw Nico and my unique chosen journey to a family of our own. Even our fertility clinic sent us a reminder to "vote for what's important to us." Ouf.

We were failed

The fifth embryo banking cycle seemed like the great redemption cycle. After a totally failed, all-aneuploid cycle number four, I can back with a vengeance, retrieving the most mature eggs ever, and churning out a full four cryopreserved embryos including my first-ever day-five embryo. (Women of advanced maternal age, such as myself, tend to have slower-growing day-sixers. Generally, a day-five has better odds of being genetically normal and a stronger overall metabolism.) Sounds like time to breathe a little easier, maybe give ourselves a pat on the back, huh? You'd think.

Instead, we lost all of this cycle's embryos. The laboratory that handles the biopsies, the final step to determine which (if any) embryos are good to go, mishandled all but one of our samples. The only one they didn't botch was the day-six embryo with the worst morphology and it was, unsurprisingly, aneuploid. As for the rest including my little pride-and-joy day-five embryo? They're all still sitting in a freezer with an "untested" status. The actions required at this point to learn if they are healthy will all but destroy them, decimating any chance they'd have of being born.

And for the service of stealing our fifth cycle, we were charged $950. Just to add insult to injury.

Casually offering a re-biopsy as though that doesn't all but eliminate the embryo's chances of being born. Cool. We just stole an entire IVF cycle from you, no big deal, yeah?

The cherry on top? My doctor casually mentioned how "it was too bad how that cycle turned out" while she had an ultrasound wand up my vagina and was dropping the news that the sixth cycle I've just begun is poised to be my worst cycle yet - only eight little follicles all looking mighty surpressed. She even offered to cancel this cycle, in case things couldn't get worse.

Sometimes I wonder if the universe isn't trying to tell me there's an off-ramp from my hare-brained idea that I should become a mom.

Survived (thrived?) another round

I'm home, my short-term memory is fully recovered, and once again I wasn't even inclined to crack open the bottle of norco. Five cycles down, one to go. I survived. You might even say thrived: for the first time we had fabulous follicular synchrony. The majority of my follicles hit maturation size together. There wasn't a single runaway abandoned to go after a more-numerous-but-slower-growing cohort. My stimulation cycle made its "normal" time frame debut. (Normal means 8-12 days, with 11 being considered optimal. I, on the other hand, have rocked 13-14 day cycles on my first four go-rounds, but enjoyed a privileged 11-day stim cycle with a total of just 29 injections and 5 blood draws this month.) And in case it wasn't enough to enjoy fewer injections and a shorter cycle window, I even got the largest number of eggs yet: 12 fully mature MIIs that got fertilized in a laboratory this very afternoon. Another tiny miracle of science that I have the extraordinary privilege to access. You'd think I'd be sitting pretty.

And yet.

And yet.

None of this means anything. Yet. Because I've lived through the crappiest stim cycle with a measly five mature eggs and came out the other side with a healthy euploid embryo. And I've lived through a strong, highest-estrogen-level, ten-whole-mature-egg cycle that yielded nada.

I've finished my part of embryo banking cycle #5. It's all in the hands of the embryologists now.

It's time to buckle up for a few weeks of emotional roller coaster waiting for the final embryo report from this cycle while I start slathering on the testosterone: come Wednesday, the hormonal priming for cycle 6 goes into full swing. With the clock ticking on that 2024 insurance maximum out-of-pocket having been met, there's no privilege of waiting for one cycle's results before diving into the next. Once again, one more time, here we go.

A story that isn't done

I've been thinking a lot about the importance of stories in human existence. Stories are how we make sense of the random series of events and experiences that form the course of our lives. It's how we define our family, our nation, our collective history. It's how we sell a CV filled with various professional experiences that we cobble together to pay the bills and hopefully find some meaningful way to contribute to society.

I tried to sell myself on the story of being the future mom who accepted the data that told her that four euploid embryos and one low-level segmental mosaic were sufficient: that odds of 199 out of 200 are squarely enough to feel confident that motherhood is secured, that it's time to move on and not agonize over the tiny reserve of eggs withering away before we thaw out our five little hopes of creating a biological family. But that's not my story. I realized I couldn't stop my fertility journey on so much heartache. The decision has torn me up and left my intestines in knots. What about our bank account? What about the odds that I now endure multiple failed cycles?

Once again, there's comfort and sanity in the stories we tell ourselves: I'm not a woman who failed IVF but a fertile woman who has created five viable embryos and who's on a mission to make a few more. I'm not someone just embarking on embryo banking but someone who's already successfully banked what most doctors would call enough for two children, and who's circling back for a couple of bonus cycles while enjoying the benefits of having hit her annual out-of-pocket limit.

We can't know what the last chapter of the IVF journey will look like, and to be fair that final bits won't come until we've implanted in years to come. All I know is I can't live with the narrative that I gave it anything less than all I had. And what I've got is two more cycles, two more tries for another frozen miracle who might one day make me a mom.

Get those seat belts back on: this ride isn't over yet.

Paris 2024

Defying all my family vacation fears, we enjoyed what I'd call our best trip back to Europe since the big move Stateside. The ambiance was wonderful—celebratory, joyful, welcoming—in short, everything Paris does not have a reputation for being. Crowds brought their national support and enthusiasm in a way this city normally wouldn't deign. Instead of hopping from place to place, we unpacked our bags for a solid nearly two weeks of relishing in all this city had to offer while the world shone its spotlight upon us, and Paris did not disappoint.

I flew out for my first time using my new passport.

While our families and bags stayed put in Paris, we made a quick hop up to Lille for an overnight stay and a basketball match between Canada and Spain, where we enjoyed a free upgrade to the fan zone's 10th row seats!

The Concord Urban Project, a space in the dead center of the city where the skateboarding, break dancing, and basketball 3-on-3 matches were held.

Beach volleyball under the glow of the Eiffel Tower, followed by a midnight stroll through Paris past the Olympic torch hot air balloon? Yes, please.

Even a couple of matches of field hockey under a brutal summer sun was more fun than expected. And the Dutch fans brought their A-game, braving the heat in all sorts of bright orange gear.

An exciting upset for the French basketball team against Canada in the quarter finals had the heart of Paris cheering in unison.

We had a pretty sweet view for the men's triple jump, various hurdles and sprints, and two new discus Olympic records! And at a distance, the women's pole vault final was a tight competition that completely drew me in.

The Spain/Netherlands women's water polo match was a nailbiter down to the very final seconds, ultimately ending in Spain's favor during shoot-outs.

With a local sweetheart among the top-ranked players, even a day on the golf course was filled with more enthusiasm than I'd expected.

We swapped out my aunt and parents for Géraldine and Merlin as our vacation partners for the final couple days in the City of Lights.

Our final Olympic event, held on the morning of the closing ceremony, was the modern pentathlon. I still tear up thinking about the moment a French competitor (at 35 years old) crossed the final finish line in second to raucous applause with her arms held proudly over her head, following the champion who'd just set a new world record. To see such joy and pride for a second place finish moved me, and there's probably a life lesson for me somewhere in there. When it came time for the medalists to approach the podium, the entire crowd broke out in a round of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, as the silver medalist cried tears of joy. It's not often the silver medalist is also treated to her national anthem. And fun fact: we witnessed the very last ever appearance of horses in the modern pentathlon! They are going to be replaced by an obstacle course in the next summer Olympics.

I suppose it wouldn't have been a proper Emilienne-and-Nico-visit-Europe vacation if we didn't squeeze in a little something extra, so we spent a night in Lisbon en route back to California. For dinner, we treated ourselves to an excellent tasting menu at Bairrices.

Dinner was followed by an after-dark tour of the heart of Lisbon. It wasn't enough to do much more than admire some panoramic views and some beautiful but dangerously slippery Portuguese cobblestones before we had to call it a night and set our alarms early for the next leg of our journey.

I'd created this blog, "Expat Homecoming", asking myself how, after a decade abroad, one can come back "home". I'm starting to understand that I'd gotten it all backwards: this blog is indeed tracking a journey back home, but that home is on the opposite side of the Pond and I'm still figuring out how to get back. I cannot wait until the day we fly to Paris one-way.

We failed

We failed. And there is nothing we can do about it. There are no fixes, no do-overs. We lit $6k on fire, and we've run out of money to make it right. All of the hoops I jumped through—hiding in restaurant bathrooms to administer meds, begging and crying and paying and bleeding my way to fix a false positive FDA test result, sacrificing my work, getting stabbed and prodded and bled out, losing all the skin across my shoulders and back to hormonal acne, missing out on aerial silks, and undergoing surgery solo while Nicolas traveled overseas—all for nothing. We tried.

Not a single embryo was compatible with life in our final cycle.

It's time to move on to the next phase, and I do not feel safe. Statistically, our five embryos should be enough. Our clinic says it. Our surrogacy agency says it. But our future as parents comes down to the outcome of five coin flips. Five chances. It would be so easy for things to go wrong, for our entire future to slip through the cracks, and by the time we'll know it's happened, it will be too late to go back. My eggs will be gone. We could ensure ourselves against that today: I still have good eggs. In fact, that last embryo in the set of this cycle's results failed exclusively due to a paternal issue. Statistically, the segmental aneuploidy listed in the first embryo more likely came from a paternal source too. (While most full chromosome abnormalities are from the mom, most segmental duplications or deletions are actually paternal in origin!) So even in this last cycle, my body didn't yield nothing useful. But pretty soon it will. A clock is ticking and our bank account balances don't align with it. I am completely terrified.

From the highest of hopes came the lowest of lows

Don't get me wrong, I want to be done. I can't tell you how much I hate all the distractions from my life, all the uncertainty, the emotional rollercoaster, the physical side effects, the scheduling conflicts. I hardly want to add more battles to my ongoing fertility coverage war with Cigna. I need to go back to 100% at work. I want my body and my life to belong to me again. Can you believe I actually ran on a treadmill for the first time in months yesterday? I still haven't internalized that I'm allowed to chase Lily when she's playing outside. Even these sorts of simple activities have been banned for months.

I just don't want it to end this way: as a failure. As someone who made nearly enough embryos to ensure herself a future she chased after, a second chance at parenthood after the collapse of the foster-to-adopt dream. As someone who gave up after coming so close. As someone who didn't have what it takes. But money is part of what it takes, and we don't have it. I can't allow myself to be the person who sacrificed all her family's financial resources, who tossed aside her responsibilities to her husband and fur babies in pursuit of a dream that was out of reach. It is out of reach. Five chances are all we'll get. And we don't know if they will be enough.