The pictures are of Aunt Lynnette giving me the HcG shot and LuAnn holding a sign saying "Here We Come"--that is from the eggs point of view. The other picture is of our two little embryos that we had transferred back to their "Happy Place" on Wednesday morning.
I have kind of hesitated to put on the latest happenings in our IVF story because of the fear of it ending with no pregnancy. I know that I have to think positively. (John read "The Secret" and now if a doubt ever passes through my lips I hear about it:) Plus I know hardly anyone reads this so what the heck!
We started another round of IVF about a month after we canceled our last cycle. This time we increased the doses of the Follicle Stimulating Hormones to see if we could get a better response. We went from a dose of 125 of Follistim to a dose of 300 nightly(not sure what kind of units those are.)
Unfortunately that didn't seem to make a difference. From what I've read this could be because of low egg quality. We ended up with a slightly lower estrogen count than when we were on the lower doses:( Because it was our second time trying and the meds didn't seem to make a difference we decided to go ahead with the retrieval even though we had low estrogen counts. We had the retrieval on Sunday October 9th. They also did a testicular biopsy on John that day and found great sperm! They were able to get 7 eggs from me.
On Tuesday (Day 2) They called and told us out of the 7 eggs we started with, 2 of the eggs were not mature but 5 of them fertilized! This was great news to me. They said they would call us the next morning and if two of them looked better than the others we would do a day 3 transfer. If not we would wait for a day 5 transfer and come in on Friday.
They called us Wednesday morning at 7am and said that two definitely looked better than the others so we needed to be there by 10am to do the transfer. Pretty exciting:) When we got there, they got us right in. Of the 5 embryos remaining the two that we would be transferring had 8 cells, one had 6 cells, one had 2 cells and one had 12 cells. They said the one with 12 cells could have some genetic abnormalities because it was so far ahead of the rest. They will let the three we are not transferring grow until the blastocyst stage on Friday. If they make it that long and they look good we will be able to freeze them.
They gave us a picture of the 2 embryos that we would be transferring and 2 valium to make me relax:). When you look at the picture you can see that one of the eggs is more fragmented than the other. The more fragmented they are the lower the quality. Dr. Johnstone said that the younger you are the less worrisome the fragments are, but it could be a sign that my eggs are low quality. They transferred the two embryos with 8 cells through a catheter into my uterus. We got to watch it on a tv screen:) Then I had to lay flat on my back for 30 minutes in their office.
They said at least one day of doing absolutely nothing. From what I've read doctors prescribe anywhere from 2-5 days of bedrest...We want to give those two little guys the best chance we can so we are going for the 5 days of bedrest until I have to go back to work on Monday. Only 80 hours left:)
Grow embies grow!
