Working Without A Net

I suppose it's for the best, since leftovers tend to sit in our fridge until they're unrecognizable. But still.

No leftover frozen embryos on a stick for us. It's the three they transferred or nothin'. According to the clinic, one of the three stragglers actually made it to blastocyst stage, but it was a sort of crumbly Grade 3 and, well, not worth freezing.

That news scared me. If none of these embryos I'm carrying sticks, it's back to square one. And of course I had to wonder if the three beautiful blastocysts we put in there yesterday have already met their demise. The thought of it made me nearly choke with fear.

And then I remembered that, as a good friend of mine constantly reminds me, I have this horrible tendency to go automatically to the Bad Scary Place Where Nothing Good Ever Happens, and that's just not rational. The fact that three of our embryos didn't make it to the freezer pales in comparison to all of the unexpected good news we've had this cycle. Plus, from what I've read, most people who do Day 5 transfers lose at least half of their embryos before Day 5. We lost none before Day 5. And the ones that made it in were all top grade.

As the same dear friend put it the other day, my job for the next two weeks is to be hopeful. I've got to keep focused on that. It helps that I've got a whole host of symptoms: I'm cranky, fatigued, sore-boobed, and alternately a little queasy and STARVING (after all, I'm eating for four!). Those symptoms could all be attributable to the progesterone and the HcG trigger shot, or they could mean something else. I don't know. But for now, I'm just going to hunker down and hope my little ass off.

Picking Up The Kids

We went to the clinic to pick up the kids today, hoping there'd be one or two left.

There were. We transferred 2 rather gorgeous Grade 1 blastocysts* and one spunky Grade 1 early blast.** One Grade 2 early blast and two Grade 2 morulas*** (they're a little slow -- about a day behind, but could still turn into blastocysts) are still in the dish. If they make some progress by tomorrow morning, they'll stick 'em in the freezer just in case.


Dr. Glass Half Full was absolutely incredulous. She said that the number of healthy blasts was way better than she would have expected from someone with an FSH of 13.7.

So now we wait. And wait. And hope, and pray that these little blasts (a) have healthy chromosomes and (b) find a nice soft nest in there, and stick, and grow.

Photos of our lovely blasts to follow, as soon as I'm allowed off the couch. I'd love to hear some ideas for how to distract myself until the pregnancy test.



Some definitions, for those of you who aren't embryologists or intimately familiar with IVF:

*Blastocysts usually develop five days after fertilization. They consist of 60-100 cells, and the cells have differentiated into two types: an inner cell mass, which will (we hope) become the fetus, and a trophectoderm, which develops into the placenta.

**An early blastocyst is an embryo that has reached the blastocyst stage, but is a little bit behind in terms of size and/or cell differentiation.

**A morula, so named because of its resemblance to a mulberry, is an embryo that hasn't reached the blastocyst stage. It consists of 12-32 cells packed tightly together. Embryos usually reach this stage four days after fertilization.