The egg retrieval went magnificently this morning! Dr. Williams was able to extract 19 eggs from my follicles! The nurse said that, typically, about 75% of those eggs will be fertilized. If that is the case for us, we should have about 13-15 embryos to work with! However, it may not end up being quite that many, due to quality variances. But we will take whatever we can get! Only the best embryos will be transferred into my uterus or frozen for later use. We should know by tomorrow or Tuesday how many embryos we have. If there are more than 5 good embryos, we will transfer 1 or 2 of them on Friday. If there are 5 or less, we will do the transfer on Wednesday. We have not decided yet how many embryos we want to transfer. As we would prefer to have just 1 baby at a time, we would like to transfer no more than 1 embryo this week. However, the doctor will tell us on the day of transfer what he thinks the odds are of just 1 embryo being successful versus 2 embryos. The factors that determine the best number of embryos to transfer are: my age, health, embryo quality, etc. We will make our decision at that time, based on the data we are given. In the meantime, this afternoon, the eggs will be fertilized and monitored over the next few days. On that note, I think a prayer is in order:
Our heavenly Father, thank you for a successful retrieval this morning! Please guide the embryologists' hands and watch over our little embryos as they grow big and strong in the days to come. Thank you for the miracle of life!! Amen.
I thought that it might be helpful to post a few videos on IVF, since the process can be a little confusing and unfamiliar to most. Note: the second video below mentions that there are 2 ways to fertilize the harvested eggs: either by putting many sperm in each dish containing an egg to fertilize on their own or through ICSI (instracytoplasmic sperm injection). ICSI is where they take the good sperm and inject one directly into each egg. Due to our male factor fertility issues, we have opted to use ICSI as a means of assisted fertilization. Luckily, our fertility clinic uses this method exclusively as well and does not charge extra for the service, as most other clinics do! I chose to post 2 videos, as one is short and to-the-point, as the other video goes a little more in-depth through the process. Enjoy!
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