PUPO: Pregnant until proven otherwise

We had a great transfer this morning! We transferred three, and they looked good. They grade embryos on a scale of 1-5, 1 being best. Last time the embryos had crapped out by now - we had two six-cells and one 7-cell, graded 2 and 3. But today we have a 9-cell grade 1 and an 8-cell and a 6-cell, both grade 2!!!! So they look much better. (And that 9-cell is just about perfect, at grade 1 and nearly double yesterday's size.)

Because they were progressing well, we had the option of waiting for two more days. But the doctor recommended going ahead. Even though the last cycle ended in miscarriage, the fact that I got pregnant suggests that day 3 embryos find me to be a hospitable home. It was also pretty aggressive to transfer three. Given the quality of the bigger two and my age, standard practice would be to transfer two. But he asked if the worst case scenario was not getting pregnant or getting pregnant with triplets. We agreed that not getting pregnant was much worse than triplets! (And I suspect he suspects that 6-cell isn't really going anywhere anyway.)

And we still have four left that might make it to freeze. In all likelihood, we'll end up with at most two frozen, but that's something.

I am feeling much better!

Cell division

As of this morning we still have seven embryos:
1 5-cell
3 4-cell
1 3-cell
2 2-cell

It's almost exactly identical to last time:
2 5-cells
2 4-cells
1 3-cell

The goal is 2-4 cells today, so they're all fine. But because it looks about the same as last cycle, they want to do the three-day transfer again. (It sounds like they probably wanted to see six or seven at the 4-cell stage in order to keep going to day 5.) So we go in first thing in the morning. We'll want to see the four biggest at 8 to 10 cells tomorrow. Last cycle, their growth slowed and our largest was 7 cells. If we're at 8 to 10 cells tomorrow, I'll feel a whole lot better about this cycle. I'll be curious to see how many they want to transfer tomorrow; I'll probably push for three or four.

I'm sad and disappointed. I really wanted to hear, "They look great! We'll transfer Monday." I'm afraid this will end the same way as the previous cycle.

100 percent!

All seven fertilized normally. We have embryos, and "they look good." We are very happy here, and thrilled we didn't ruin everything Monday night! We'll be back with another update tomorrow.

Lucky number 7

As predicted, Dr. R got seven eggs this morning. So far, there's no indication that our misadventures Monday night hurt anything. We'll hear tomorrow how many fertilized; we'll have a better sense then if they matured properly. But the nurse told us a sad story of a patient just last week who did her trigger shot wrong and ended up with no eggs. We were praised for calling the doctor to come up with a plan; that patient didn't. I've taken a long nap and am still groggy, with some abdominal discomfort. But things went really well.

So nervous

That's a relief!

I'm pregnant! Okay ... not really. But the trigger shot is the same hormone that is produced by pregnancy. So I took a pregnancy test this morning to make sure we had actually succeeded last night. And sure enough, it came up positive. So the trigger is on board. Next up: will the eggs mature in time for retrieval tomorrow?

And everything had been going so smoothly....

Well. That was a disaster. I don't know whether we had a bad needle or I had somehow screwed it on wrong, but we ended up spilling some (half? most?) of the trigger shot when we tried to inject it. After several minutes of panic, my hero Brent paged the doc. They discussed the options, and we were fortunate to find a pharmacy not too far away that actually carries the medication. (That's a surprise, since its most common use is as a steroid, so pharmacies don't like to sell it.) The doctor called in a new prescription. And while things still did not go altogether well, we did get another half-dose injected (while looking like junkies, no doubt, in the Walgreens parking lot). Now we hope that it wasn't too late and the eggs are mature by the time of retrieval on Wednesday.