They retrieved 24 eggs which was great and of those, 17 were mature! After they knew which ones were mature they performed ICSI on them, which I explained in more detail in our last blog what this is, but basically its where they put a sperm into the egg to fertilize it. Of those 17 eggs they fertilized, 11 of them took and are developing! So as of now we have 11 embryos that are developing but normally this amount will decrease due to some of them will develop abnormally. This picture shows the stages of the embryos in more detail :
Day 1: 1 cell with 2 dots in the middle. This indicates a normally fertilized egg with each dot representing genetic materials from the mom and the dad.
Day 2: usually 2-4 cells. The cells are expected to double every 24 hours or so.
Day 3: usually 6-8 cells. Sometimes more cells. Same doubling effect. This is when fragmentation can be observed (small dots, not clean cell divisions) representing abnormal cells. I’ve read somewhere that chromosonal abnormality can be around 25-70%.
Day 4: Morula or compacting cell stage. This is when the cells have doubled to around 16 and the individual balls are starting to expand and blend with the others. You can see the bumps still.
Day 5: Blastocyst. This is when we see 3 distinct parts – the shell, one dense bunch of cells (the baby), and the lighter cells (the placenta). The blastocyst is ready for implantation but first it has to hatch from the shell. The picture on the bottom right is a hatching blastocyst (can happen naturally or with the help of your embryologist – assisted hatching, like ours in IVF#1). The hatched blastocyst should implant within 12-24 hours to the uterine lining.
They originally told us we would be doing a day 3 transfer because sperm obtained through ICSI does not thrive as well in the artificial environment. But since we still have 11 embryos, that as far as they can tell now are great quality they are debating doing a day 5 transfer! The nurse I talked to today said when they call me with the update on the embryo development in the morning they may have a better idea of which day we will be transferring! A day 5 transfer is better overall than day 3 just because they can tell which embryos are the best even more by day 5 and then they don't have to transfer as many which reduces the risk of multiples. They originally told us they were probably going to transfer 2 embryos but now I am not sure and won't know until the day of transfer.
So for now while we wait I have to take my medrol pill (which is pretty much an anti rejection pill so my body won't reject the embryos), my progesterone oil shot, my antibiotic, and starting tomorrow I begin the prometrium pills as well. The shots that I had been taking were no problem at all but the progesterone oil shot is definitely not fun and leaves me sore but it will be worth it. This is the first muscle shot I have had to do thankfully, but when I get a positive pregnancy test I will continue this for at least 10 weeks!
They said that we may not know whether we are transferring the embryos Saturday up until about an hour and a half before. So we will update the blog either way with a short update either on our embryo development or details on how the transfer went Saturday! Please keep the prayers coming we can see they are working! Everything has gone completely perfect so far!
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