8 Eggs!

Last time 6 eggs, this time 8 eggs.  That could totally mean the difference in 1 additional embryo to freeze so while it's not 20 eggs or even 15 - we are VERY PLEASED.  We were expecting 6-7, so to get 8 is awesome.

Awesome!

Maybe I should take back a little bit of the "doubling my meds didn't really seem to help all that much" talk.  Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.  Maybe there's sometimes no rhyme or reason as to why IVF is more or less successful from 1 cycle to another.  That latter statement is probably the truest.  But regardless, we're happy.  We're feeling much closer to being able to schedule a transfer now than we were back in November.  Thank goodness we weren't always dreaming of having 5-6 kids!  Or this could go on forever...

My retrieval went just exactly as planned.  I gave a good recap during my first IVF cycle so if you'd like - go ahead and read that.  It's just about EXACTLY how Thursday went down minus the goofy drugged out comments (I tried very hard to keep it together) and the grocery-store run afterwards (I bought all needed groceries the day before, just in case!)  The day after retrieval I actually felt far better than I did last time too.  Just a bit of spotting for a couple days, but almost no gas-pains.

Now we wait.  This is the hard part (well, a lot of it is hard parts...)  I get nervous each morning I see an email from Dr. A - but I want that email SO BADLY too!

For those of you who've gone through this, maybe you have had similar morning thought routines in the week after an egg retrieval.  It kinda goes like this:

"Oh Gawd oh gawd there's an email... Oh YES it's from Dr. A!  Oh no, wait - CRAP it's from Dr. A... Is it good?  is it bad?  Should I open it?  Maybe I don't want to open it.  OK I'm gonna open it!!  Down 1 embryo from yesterday, but all the rest are excellent.  NOOooooOOOooo!!!  Oh, wait - I  guess I can handle that...  Yesssssssss!  We're in good position.  We still have X more.  But NOooOOoo down 1?!!  No...we're okay.  Think positively!  But wait... does that mean we'll only have X to freeze?  Maybe I should Google more stats on success with X-number of frozen embryos.  It's okay that I did the same Google search yesterday and some of the info freaked me out!  I take it all with a grain of salt - right?  Yes, I'm totally in control of my over-active imagination.  Okay, okay - we'll be fine; this is fine.  Wait I just read remembered some scary stats I read, maybe it's not fine.  Oh but hmm - we proved those stats wrong last cycle..." and all of this runs through my head in the timeframe of about 1.5 seconds.

So if you feel this same way - you're definitely not alone.

For an explanation on embryo grading I like this page.  This is also a good page, but their grading is backwards from the grading that was done for our embryos.  (For us, the lower the number, the better.)  As these fertilized eggs, aka. cleavage stage embryos age, they will have a grade and a cell count and that's the report we would get each day.  The grading refers to the even-ness of the cells size and lack of fragmentation (the more even-ness and less fragmentation, the better, and the lower the grade #).  We also want to see the number of cells increase each day from ~2 cells in the first day to ~8 by the 3rd day.  We would get these daily reports along this grading scale for the first 3 days.  Day 4 there is no report because they are morulas and Day 5 the report/rating changes since they are (hopefully) blastocysts by then.

Our First 3 Daily Reports

Day 1 (Day after retrieval):
Tracking 7 embryos!

Embryo Count	Cells Count	Grading
7	NA	NA

7 of our 8 mature eggs fertilized which was great news.  At this point, we continue to be 2 up from our previous round - so that's way better than being 2 behind the first round!  No quality report yet today - we'll start seeing quality tomorrow.

Day 2 (1/18):
Tracking 6 embryos!

Embryo Count	Cells Count	Grading
3	4	1
2	4	2
1	5	2
1	1	5

Dr. A is feeling good about what we're seeing here.  1 of the embryos stopped growing and dividing well (the 1 cell/grade 5) so we'll stop counting on that one.  But the others look great and Dr. A feels that they're all high pregnancy potential and we're in good position to have more than 1 normal as a result of this IVF round - that's exactly what we're hoping for.  With our 1 frozen embryo now, we'd really like 1-2 more, to feel confident about having 2 children.

Day 3 (1/19):
Tracking 5 embryos!

Embryo Count	Cells Count	Grading
2	8	1.5
3	8	3
1	6	3
1	5	3

This is mixed news for us.  Of course we're SO happy to see the 2-8 cell/grade 1.5 embryos.  Dr. A is very confident we'll get blastocysts out of those 2 - which keeps us exactly on track with last cycle.  There's maybe a 25% chance that any of those 3-8 cell/grade 3 embryos would develop into a blast though.  Hey, 25% is 25%.  You just never know what might happen over the next couple days.  But typically you'd want your embryos to be graded between 1-2.5 at this stage.  The 5&6 cell/grade 3 embryos aren't going to come through for us (we'd stopped counting on one of them, yesterday already).  One thing that surprised me however, is if you compare the Day 2-3 tables, that 1 cell/grade 5 embryo grew all the way to a 5 cell/grade 3 overnight.  Still probably won't come through for us, but it's encouraging to see even the "bad" ones are fighters!

We take tomorrow off since on Day 4, the embryos are morulas and going through compaction which makes it very difficult to grade, so the day is skipped and we pick up where we left off on Day 5 with the start of blastocyst grading reports (a different grading system than above).

By the way, fun IVF fact: did you know that a morula (Day 4 embryo) is called that because at this stage it resembles a mulberry?  (in Latin, morus means mulberry)

Happy Mulberry Day!