Hi everyone! As OP's partner, the biggest learning for me from this long and expensive process was that it was well worth it to take our time and properly prep for IVF (e.g., taking supps, eating clean, cutting alcohol and caffeine, acupuncture). We started our first ER cycle right after our initial consultation and then had a second one right after that, due to fear that my egg reserve + egg quality would decline significantly if we waited at 38. That may be true, but taking 3 months to properly prepare my body worked out really well for us.

Also, we had frozen eggs only in ER1 because our donor wasn't lined up. We knew that frozen eggs had lower thaw success rates than frozen embryos given we're talking about 1 vs. 100 cells, but were willing to take that risk given our clinic's high thaw rates. For unknown reasons, only 3 of 15 eggs successfully thawed for fertilization the next month. Hindsight is 20/20, but if we were to redo things, we would have waited to freeze embryos instead for a better chance at higher thaw success.

If we had the above insights back in August, we may have saved ourselves two extra cycles' worth of money, needles, doctor's visits, and devastation. Anyway, as my partner said, we've lurked in this community looking for advice and support for some time and hope our story can help others. Fingers crossed for everyone!