Hi Jed & Jade.
Just thought I better pop you a very quick update…as you know, ER was yesterday and your mom had to phone today to get the Fertilisation Report.
The details from the lovely nurse Mans are as follows:
- They retrieved 6 eggs, but could obviously tell straight away that 1 of them wasn’t going to be any use (which is why they told us yesterday that they got 5);
- They ICSI’d the 5 remaining eggs yesterday after cleaning them and washing my sperm;
- As of this morning, we have 3 fertilised eggs.
So, there are three in the running…just gotta hope as many of them as possible manage to develop, divide and do whatever fertilised eggs need to do before they can be replaced from whence they came.
So, we have a potential 3 embryo’s.
This is pretty damn awesome. I’m so excited I’ve not done any work today at all (shhhh don’t tell your mom, she’ll give me The Look – you know the one – the pursed lips, the raised eyebrow – that one). I’ve spent all day on the forum, reading blogs, staring out the window – and there’s only a vibacrete wall outside the office window, so was obviously seeing something else to have spent so long doing it. And what I was seeing was the potential future…like the Flash Forward programme we’ve been watching on telly…glimpsing the future (but in my case without the FBI, guns, CIA, devious characters, secret organisations, marriage breakups, military subcontractors, coded messages and death & destruction).
In my defence, I have done two loads of laundry, washed a whole weekends worth of dishes, given the tumble-dryer a thorough cleaning, done a little online banking and generally tidied up the house…but none of that is income generating…it also doesn’t require concentration which is why I’ve managed to do those chores but absolutely no work.
Now there may be other people who, when undergoing IVF, would be bitterly disappointed with only 3 embies at this stage of the game…but I’ll let you into a little secret…I was fully prepared for the result to be none, zero, nada, zip.
There was a large part of me really worried that, although my body is now producing sperm (and granted it’s not like we’re talking thousands, let alone millions), there was no guarantee that they were actually any good…they could have all been hopelessly immature, they could have been deformed or inadequate, they could have been as much use as a waterproof teabag. And this has been playing on my mind ever since we agreed to go ahead with IVF this cycle. This feeling that we hadn’t given my body enough time to start producing something up to the job, that we were putting ourselves through a lot of heartache, and your mom through lots of discomfort and pain, without even knowing if my swimmers were ready for the big time.
And I’m not enough of a fertility expert yet to know if this is still the case…but I’ve decided that the fact that we have 3 fertilised embies as of 11am this morning, that this is something I can now stop worrying about…phew, 1 less reason for a SNAIF. and I’m pretty sure it’s 1 less reason for your mom to worry too…because, as much as we talk about anything and everything, I’m pretty sure she’s been worried about this exact issue too, but hasn’t wanted to say anything. I’m pretty sure that in the back of her mind she’s been worrying about the quality of her eggs too (as we’ve not had any previous procedure or opportunity to evaluate her eggs at all). So, unless told otherwise, we can both stop worrying about that too.
Looks like ET (Embryo Transfer) will take place on Thursday – day three transfer, assuming we still have growing embies. I’m really really hoping we’re going to have to have a discussion with the Prof about how many to put back, because that’ll mean there’s more than 1 and that would be awesome. I’m assuming that if all three are good, we’ll only put two back and confine the third to the freezer…but we’ll wait and see – I’m not counting my blastocysts before the embryonic cleavage of the zygote.
Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, ET doesn’t require the same sedatives they administered for ER, so there’s likely to be fewer laughs. But I’ll do my very best to keep my eyes open to any potential humour to report back (let’s just hope it’s not at my expense yet again!).
So, plenty of GROW EMBIES GROW thoughts being directed towards the clinic…(because “cleave mitotically zygote cleave mitotically” just doesn’t have the same ring to it). It would be great if all three were still in the running in a few days time…I may need to spend a little time thinking up another name beginning with a ‘J’, because who knows, two names may not be enough…
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
