Eight is Enough

I'm a day behind in posting but I honestly think it's taken us this long to catch up on sleep and wrap our heads around our wonderful fertilization results!  This blustery, frigid Sunday morning we have a lot to be thankful for, that's for sure.  Fittingly, we were in the Wegman's parking lot about to chow down on some hormone-sanctioned sour cream doughnuts (heavenly!) when the phone rang.

It was Nurse Talia from RMA calling to tell us that 10 of our 18 eggs were fertilized and 8 of those made it to embryo stage.  Eight!  That's a great starting number, as we can expect to lose half of them in the next four days.  (I realize that sounds quite morbid but it's a statistically sound prediction.)   I'll take four blastocyts.  Heck, I'll take two so long as they're healthy.  It would be a dream come true to have leftover "frosties" but really our main goal is to have at least two to transfer.  Who knows?  If they both took, we'd be "two-for-one and done."  ha! 

My pal who went through this process assures me that the next four days are almost as bad as the dreaded "2ww" (two-week wait before the pregnancy test) but that no news is good news on the embryo front.  If all is progressing well, we can expect a phone call by noon on Wednesday telling us how many blasts we have and what time our transfer is scheduled for on Thursday morning. 

Of course there is the very real possibility that none of them make it to Day 5 which means they have arrested and are not viable or, alternatively, that they are growing but too slowly and just need a bit more time to mature.  The defined window for arrested development is failure to progress over 48 hours.  We'd get a phone call if this were to occur.  If we have growth but it's not within our designated window of time, this would move us to a FET (frozen embryo transfer) sometime in January and we wouldn't know this till Wednesday. 

So much could go wrong, it's kind of astounding that IVF is ever successful.  But we've put our faith in the experts and in nature to take its course.