I’m Down to My Last Embryo

After four years, multiple IVF cycles, three devastating miscarriages, and countless setbacks … Aela’s road to motherhood has been anything but easy. Follow her story on Babble and don’t miss the latest chapter in her journey below.

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I’ve finally let go of saying things like, “I can’t believe this is my story.”

In four years’ time, I’ve undergone three fresh IVF cycles, seven frozen embryo transfers (FETs), four insemination cycles, suffered from a 2nd trimester miscarriage of my twins at 17 weeks, a 10-week miscarriage, and a biochemical pregnancy at five weeks. That list can be exhausting to write. For a good long while, I was continuously shocked by my own story, that disappointment and heartache found their way to me time and again on this journey. But I’m no longer stunned by my own experiences.

I have finally gotten to a place where I’ve accepted this as my story, a place of better self-awareness for the battle I’m in. There’s a strange peace in that, especially now that we’re down to the wire with a single embryo left from an IVF cycle that brought 12 healthy embryos last spring. In an odd plot twist, I now look forward to what’s next. I’m not sad, frustrated, or in pain wondering what could possibly happen next?! 

So, here’s to you, my lone, last embryo.

There’s a lot riding on this one. While I could likely produce more, it’s not a given that we’ll continue this route. So if it doesn’t like my uterus and decides not to make it’s home there for the next nine months, we have some big decisions to make. Do I do another fresh IVF cycle if this FET isn’t successful? It’s certainly a possibility. But how many times do you repeat something that keeps failing before moving on to something else? I always get a good amount of eggs, and they develop into high-quality embryos, but they don’t stick or stay. And with no answers as to why, you begin to feel a bit crazy for doing the same thing over and over again when it just isn’t working.

Let’s say I do another IVF cycle. Do we then transfer the embryos into my wife? Perhaps we’d have better luck with her uterus. I’ve committed so much of my time and my body to this process, it would be hard to let go of that role if we did choose the route of Sara’s uterus. Can I let that go? I think I’m finally at a point where I can.

But can Sara? She’s agreed she could do it if I couldn’t, but has admitted she has mixed feelings about being pregnant. She wants children, obviously, but we always believed I would be the one to carry. Then after a miscarriage of her own, her feelings about being pregnant became even more conflicted. While she likely could do this — carry and birth a baby — I would never want her to do something she wasn’t totally comfortable with. And I certainly wouldn’t want her to do it because she felt pressured to — not by me, not by the feelings of being “our only hope,” and definitely not by others.

We’ve had a couple of friends offer to be our surrogate. Talk about an emotionally wild thought and possibility. I picture this goddess of a woman, of a friend, growing my baby and delivering us the greatest gift we’ve ever known. But my brain can’t fully wrap itself around this idea. It seems so dreamlike to me at this point, like someone else’s story. But it’s there.

If we take any of these paths next, we will need more sperm. That’s an exhausting — albeit exciting — process on its own. Shopping for sperm and picking out a donor from massive online databases is time consuming and emotionally taxing. This will be our fifth donor. People sometimes suggest that the problem isn’t me, that maybe we need different sperm. But that’s not the case. I’ve already had sperm from four separate donors.

Heck, maybe I’ll say goodbye to motherhood altogether and travel the world instead. Sometimes, just for a moment or two, I dream of escaping this story entirely. Putting it all behind me, behind us, and just going. But I know, I truly do, that that is not what I want. While I sometimes desire an escape — a break — from this sad song seemingly stuck on repeat, I can’t genuinely see my life childless. At nearly 38 years old, with no children, you’d think this vision would be an easy one, since it’s what I’m living. But it’s the saddest option on the table, even if I can romanticize it at times.

Maybe I don’t go on to a fourth IVF cycle. Maybe Sara doesn’t get pregnant. Maybe my goddess friend doesn’t carry our baby. Maybe we don’t travel the world childless not by choice.

Maybe, we adopt.

We’ve talked about adoption since before our fertility journey ever began. Originally, it’s how we thought we’d start our family. But we were living in a one-bedroom apartment at the time, and even now we live in a one-bedroom cottage, so it hasn’t been something we could seriously consider. Agencies won’t even talk to you unless you have a 2-bedroom. So maybe we get a bigger house and do this. Maybe I let go of the dream of being pregnant, of my wife being pregnant, of someone else carrying our baby. Maybe we find motherhood through adoption.

These are the questions you ask when you’re down to one embryo.

I know because that’s where I’m at. And I’ve been here before: down to the last one of a cycle. So much rides on it. But nothing rides higher than the hope it carries. Because if this embryo does take, what a lovely story of how this baby came to us. After all the others that didn’t stay. And if any of the others had stayed, this baby would never have found their way to my uterus, and just maybe, I’d start believing all that crap about everything happening for a reason.

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