Eggs have to be at the perfect maturity in order to fertilize. Of the 26 eggs that were collected, only 19 of them were at the right stage to fertilize.
We had a procedure done called ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection). In traditional IVF, they put the best sperm in a petri dish with the eggs and let them naturally fertilize. With ICSI, they individually take a sperm and inject it into an egg. HOW DO THEY DO THIS?! It seriously blows my mind. They literally have a little glass pipette that picks up a single sperm and injects it into an egg. How do they have pipettes that small?? I really wish I could get a tour of an IVF lab!
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Not our egg...just a picture of what it would look like. |
The next day you don't get an update. Ahhhhh the wait!
On day three they called to let us know that of the 12 fertilized eggs, 11 of them were still growing. The embryologist at the lab rattled off a bunch of numbers of how many cells each one of the eggs had because they were all at different stages but I didn't understand most of what she said. At the end I just said "so how many of those are good?" haha That's when I realized despite all of the mumbo jumbo she said, 11 were still good and growing. This was definitely more hopeful for me!
Day 4-- no update.
The clinic had been calling with updates around 8-9 am on update days but day 5 I didn't get a call like I expected. Not a huge deal except we were at the lake and going to go out on the boat for the day. When we got to the boat I had a missed call from the clinic even though my phone never rang! I had the ringer turned all the way up and held it in my hand the entire time because I didn't want to miss it. I thought they would leave a voicemail but no such luck.
I was really confused by this because I gave them explicit permission to leave me voicemails. Then I realized maybe my mailbox was full. My phone has a bad habit of not notifying me when the voicemail was full so I was super bummed! Since it was a Saturday there was no way for me to call them back. Day 5 is an important update too because they will freeze eggs that make it to day 5. So these were the final numbers of how many eggs we will have to work with!
We had a fun day on the lake and got home late in the afternoon. A couple hours after we got home I had a voicemail come through! Why it took sooooo long, I do not know.
They said that 4 of the embryos were far enough along to freeze and that they were going to continue watching another 4 that were slower growing but still growing.
Day 6- Our final update! The embryologist said 3 more had reached the stage where they could freeze them so we have 7 total to freeze!! This is really the best scenario I could have hoped for! I feel so happy having seven. It feels like the perfect number. It's more than just getting one try, but the likelyhood that all seven will result in a pregnancy is small so even if half of them took, we can still have multiple children! It just gives me so much hope for the future.
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