4

So out of my 11 large follicles on Tuesday (my best follicle scan to date) I had my worst ER result.  Only 4 eggs were retrieved.  Needless to say I wasn't happy.

Going to the clinic today I was worried about many thing - the weather, the roads, the traffic, being late, dh not producing.  The one thing that I was not worried about was getting a low egg count.  We got up at 5, left at 5:30.  It was just rain for the first hour of the drive, and then snow just at the end and though the traffic was busy we must have just been ahead of the morning rush so we didn't get stopped once. 
We arrived at the clinic at 6:45 with an ER time for 9, and a scheduled arrival time of 8, so we were very early, but that didn't matter because we were there.

So when I woke up and they told me there was only 4 they had to draw my blood to check the hcg level thinking the trigger may not have worked.  I seriously doubt it would be this since this is my third cycle and I had no problem with trigger the last 2 times.  I did notice this time though that I didn't have many symptoms after the shot, but I read that that is very normal.  My last ivf it was like night and day and it was the start of 9 months of night peeing. However this cycle I was peeing frequently since a few days into the cycle so it wasn't something that I was able to notice a change with.  I guess it would have been good to do a hpt yesterday morning, but I just didn't see the need to waste money on one just to see a false bfp.

Anyways I read online that the most common cause of empty follicles is due to bad eggs.  That normally after the hcg or lh surge the egg undergoes meiosis halfing the chromosome number and it also secretes an enzyme to become looser from the follicle wall.  The theory is when the egg is bad (meaning it probably is not chromosomally normal) it doesn't loosen from the wall and therefore is not able to be retrieved despite repeatly flushing at ER.  Unfortunately if this is the case there is nothing that really can be done to correct the problem.  Sometimes using a different protocal or doubling the trigger, or using a different trigger can result in a better response, but not always.  I think this is the biggest worry.  Even if we change things for next time and despite things looking great on the u/s and bloodwork that we can still get a poor response at ER.

Anyways right now I am just hoping these 4 are all mature and fertilize and grow.  I won't find out anything for another 2 days so praying that the report that day will be a positive one (despite our poor response today) and that we will have at least one good (hopefully two) embryos to transfer on Sunday.  And here to think that I could have gotten to do a 5dt if they would have been able to get all 11 eggs.