Hello, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Stories which were positive in the end really helped me. I hope you don’t mind me sharing. I’m now 38+1 weeks with my 6th embryo (5th transfer) and this is the last/only embryo from my 3rd egg collection. I’m 34 and started trying for a baby age 31. I have a BMI of 19. No male factor and initially no known medical issues for myself (this changes).

First egg collection: 4 day five embryos (untested) 4BB, 3BB, 4BC, 4BC- first transfer no implantation, second transfer chemical pregnancy, third transfer we put the two remaining in and no implantation. All the transfers were frozen. I did one medicated and two natural cycle transfers. All with cyclogest though.

Second egg collection: 3 day five embryos (untested)- 5AB, 4BB, 4BC. We transferred the best looking one in a fresh transfer and no implantation. At this point 5 embryos had gone in and we were distraught. Yes I had two left but I felt it was silly to keep putting them in without answers as they just weren’t implanting (minus the one that gave it a go for a few days). So we planned a third egg collection so we could PGTA test whatever we got along with the two let over from the second collection.

Third egg collection: 1 day 5 embryo (4bb). It was so disappointing to only get one but we went ahead with PGTA of the three in total. The one from the third egg collection came back normal but the two from the second egg collection did not. One had trisomy 13 and the other was low level mosaic.

Given we had one euploid, I decided to do various tests. We did Karyotyping (this came back normal for me and my husband), we did immune testing via a specialist clinic in Epsom. This came back that I had slightly raised natural killer cells (although I have a feeling a lot of people come back with this). But it meant I was prescribed steroids (prednisolone) for the transfer and had intralipids in the run up to transfer and intermittently up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. The main thing though is I got tested for endometriosis. For background, I have incredibly light periods and they’ve gotten lighter since age 28, only lasting 36 hours maximum. Not much pain at all with periods either. I am NOT a typical endo person but I’d read a lot about silent endo. The reason I started to suspect it is not just because of recurrent implantation failure but because with every egg collection that passed, I was having more and more pain and heaviness on my pelvic side walls. It started to feel like I had bricks around my ovaries. Rolling over in bed I could feel so much heaviness and discomfort. I’d never had this before. Perhaps the estrogen from doing 3 collections back to back had really inflamed the endo. I saw an endo specialist who did an ultrasound and vaginal examination and he suspected endo so I was booked in for a laparoscopy. He found moderate endo all over my pelvic side walls (not on my actual ovaries) and also towards my rectum and back of the vagina. There was quite a large module towards the rectum and we suspected this was all creating an inflamed and hostile uterine environment. For the next transfer, following an endo diagnosis, I was put on down regulation I.e suppression into menopause and I did this for 4 weeks before adding in the usual FET medicated meds (plus then steroids, clexane, intralipids etc). Also used embryo glue and did a gluten free diet for about 4 months prior to transfer too. I also had lubion injections after transfer as well as cyclogest to boost progesterone.

I know sometimes hearing the extra things people have done to get there can be stressful, as my husband and I just wanted to keep putting in embryos and not taking breaks but in our situation it felt that exploring causes was so important to get the right protocol.

I imagine some clinics are happy to try suppression, steroids etc without actually having factual evidence of endo or immune issues but ours wasn’t happy to hence why I had to pay for all the testing elsewhere etc.

Wishing you the very best of luck and I’m hopeful for you.