Funny Estrace Story, and Obsessing over stats!

We will start with funny estrace story.

So we went into the clinic on CD2 to get started with the FET. I had the baseline ultrasound, saw the doc, and had bloodwork. My head was just kind of spinning with all the new information and how fast things were going to go. I saw the nurse who gave me my estrace and instructions on how to take them.

I heard 2 tabs.

The next morning I took my 2 tabs. I talked to DH about it when he got home from work, how excited I was about it and that I ONLY had to take these 2 little tabs a day. He said 2? I thought you were only supposed to take 1. So because he questioned it, his job to call the nurses.

We found out we were BOTH wrong. 2 tabs, 3 times a day. How we ever stayed straight during the IVF is a miracle. Granted we didn't have an 11 month old to chase around then either. But luckily it was caught early on, and by no intention really. And my lining was fine even though day one I only had 1/3 of the dose I should have.

Moving on to the stats.

I have completely convinced myself that our chances at pregnancy with the FET are actually GREATER than with our fresh IVF that got us our gorgeous daughter. How have I managed this...2 ways actually.

First there are the 2 schools of thought. One is that frozen embryos are weaker and more fragile, and less susceptible to produce a viable pregnancy, just due to the freezing and thawing process (if they make it through thaw). The second is that a frozen embryo that is strong enough to survive freezing and thawing, is quite likely to produce a pregnancy. I subscribe to the more optimistic second school of thought.

My clinic has stats posted on their website from 2007. I would love more recent, but that will do, I can't find more recent stats anywhere.

They have the fresh IVF pregnancy rates divided by age group, and are as follows : 51% <35, 39% 35-39, and 20% >=40. The FET stats though are just clumped together to make 33% success rate. If you were to add up the fresh IVF's and divide by 3, to produce a lumped together stat, you get 36.6%. For what its worth, I am 26(almost 27) and my embryos are 25(retrieved just a few weeks after my birthday).

So you compare fresh stat of 36.6% to the FET at 33% (these are all own egg stats too, the have the DE stats separate) With what I am sure is a margin of error of a % or 2...that is pretty darn similar.

Also, our clinic does assisted hatching of all frozen embryos, as their zona can harden and make it difficult for the embryo to hatch. We did not do assisted hatching with our IVF. So this I feel adds to our chances too, because maybe that second embryo in our fresh IVF didn't implant because it never hatched (you never know).

We transferred 2 day 3 embryos after our IVF in September 2009. Got pregnant, with one baby. if our chances are the same, or better potentially, I may be going from empty and broken hearted starting the year in 2009, to having 3 kids under 2 in 2012. CRAZY.