Embryo Update

Over the past few days, I've been receiving daily phone calls about the progress of our embryos.  Each day, I waited on pins and needles for the report and, even though I knew they couldn't all have stayed near perfect, I was still extremely disappointed whenever I heard one was struggling.

After investing so much in the egg development, I found myself extremely emotionally attached to the growing embryos.  I would cheer for them, pray for them, and each time we lost one my heart would break a little.  Unfortunately, as is the nature of this sort of thing, time showed clearly which were strong, which were weak, and which were irreparably flawed.

When the growth period ended and the dust finally settled, we were left with only 6 embryos that were of high enough quality to freeze.  Of those, 2 were Grade A blastocysts, 3 were Grade B blastocysts, and one was still in the morula stage.  When the cells become blastocysts, they have two distinct cell types that become baby and placenta.  Grade A blastocysts are the best that you can transfer.

Day 5 Morula

Day 5 Blastocyst

A study conducted by the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago found that in women under age 35 who had blastocysts transferred, 69.4% resulted in a live birth for each embryo transferred.  These statistics are very encouraging to me.  Now that we have only six embryos, we need this to work.  We don't have a lot of chances.  Because we are going to try transferring two embryos, that will leave us with only three chances total to get a baby of our own.  After all the expense and the heartache that goes into this process, I'm not up for repeating the whole thing again.  As far as we're concerned, if these transfers don't work, we will have to make the decision between adopting a child or having our family be complete as it is.

I have to admit that after beginning with so many eggs that I suffered from OHSS, to end up with only 6 embryos is extremely disheartening.  I feel like I've been through so much and I've been given such positive feedback that I genuinely expected better results.  It also hammers in the notion that if it is this difficult for us to make a baby with assisted reproductive technology, our chances of having a baby without it are likely as grim as they told us.  That is a difficult fact to accept.

During today's phone call, they told me that the transfer would be scheduled for September 26th.  That seems such a far distance away.  It would be nice to know now what the next step for us would be; whether heartfelt discussion or preparing for our new love.  I'm pretty sure with all of this, the waiting is the hardest part.