November 19, 2009...We Have Fertilization!!!

Our nurse called me this morning at about 9:30 with our news. Of the 12 eggs they retrieved yesterday, one of them was immature and one was "empty" or lacking any genetic material. So 10 of them were appropriate to be fertilized using ICSI, (inserting a single sperm directly into each egg). Out of those 10 eggs, 6 of them fertilized!!!! We are soo excited to get this news!! We were also supposed to find out today whether or not we would be doing a 3 or a 5 day transfer. But, it turns out that 6 embryos is a borderline number to make a decision, so they weren't able to tell us today...go figure. The embryologist would like to give them another day in the lab and call us tomorrow with the decision. I've been reading a lot about it and have definitely found some varying opinions in the medical community about which day is better to transfer embryos back into the uterus. I read today that when embryos are cultured from day 3 to day 5, some of them may stop developing but most of them will continue to become blastocysts. Therefore, by choosing the best blastocysts for transfer on day 5, they can choose much more reliably those with the best potential for implanting and making a baby. In my opinion, I would feel better about a 5-day transfer, because it allows the embryos a little more time to develop and to reach the important bastocyst stage before transferring them back. I am sure it is a case-by-case situation of watching each particular couple's embryos to see how well they're tolerating it in the lab and whether the embryologist thinks it would be beneficial to get them into the womb sooner. Either way, we won't know our transfer day until tomorrow. And, of course, we still don't know how many we'll transfer back because we don't know how many out of the 6 will make it that far. Most likely, because of my age, the doctor will recommend transferring only one or two embryos. But trust me, we didn't come this far to only transfer one...I will fight tooth and nail to transfer two...we are too invested at this point. We hope and pray that all of them grow like they're supposed to so we can freeze the one's we didn't use for a future cycle. If any of them make it long enough and look healthy enough to go through the freezing process, our next cycle would be starting right here. Everything we have done up to this point would not have to be done again if we could use frozen embryos. They would only have to survive thawing and the transfer. Which would be a miracle, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves!

As far as healing from the egg retrieval, I am feeling pretty good. Yesterday I had some terrible cramping but slept most of the day away. Today I still have some pretty good cramping, but nothing to complain about. When I put my dress pants on this morning and went to button them up, I thought to myself I would much rather be spending the day in my pajamas!!!