Three Little Piggies

The results are in!  And we are so completely thrilled, thankful, feeling fortunate, feeling blessed and so excited.  Not one, not two, but THREE of our 5 blastocysts which were sent for PGS testing came back normal!!  With the frozen embryo we had from our first cycle, this absolutely and totally puts us exactly where we wanted to be in order to have a couple kids over the next few years.

We got 3 little piggies!
(cuz everyone loves chubby babies, right?!)

I can't think of better news to receive upon waking up at home on a lazy Saturday morning.  Hubby and I were able to read Dr. A's (very excited) email, review the test results and then leisurely, yet giddily discuss the timing for our frozen embryo transfer!  All the other "embryo update emails" I'd received the past week I had to share with him later at night since we were both at work during the day; so this was a treat.  We were so happy to have such great success and even happier to talk about what it means for us!

During our first cycle, when we got our PGS results from Dr. A - she asked us to come in for a consult and to be given the results in person.  I'm not sure if that's because we had more of a precarious result the first time (50% success: 1 of our 2 blastocysts was "normal"), and she therefore wanted to counsel us on next steps, chat about what we learned from the cycle and call out what was important to celebrate.  Or maybe it's just BECAUSE it was our first cycle and by our second cycle it was all old hat.  But regardless, for our 2nd cycle she emailed us our results immediately instead of asking us to come in to get them from her.  It's important to note that when you review the actual IVIGEN report, you see the genders of the normal and abnormal embryos.  I had speculated in my first cycle that it could be very difficult for some couples to see the gender of the abnormal embryos - it makes it seem like more of a loss to know the gender.  But for us, knowing the genders and feeling loss really wasn't an issue.  To us, an abnormal embryo is one we would not truly be able to rely on to give us a family and we were just happy to have the ability to avoid a potentially devastating situation.

So when we left off last time, we had just been pleasantly surprised with FIVE great looking blastocysts from our 7 fertilized eggs:

• 5AA (Hot Damn that's a good looking blast!)
• 3AB
• 2AA
• 2AB
• 6BB (but very small)

We were already tickled and just hoping to find out that 1-2 were chromosomally normal.  However, our results did us even better: THREE were normal!

The 5AA, 2AA and 2AB were all normal!  And that 5AA blast is a true beauty.  High scores and high expansion grade - Dr. A says the kid is going to Princeton.  ;)  Guess we better start $aving.  

3AB and 6BB had Trisomy 16 and Trisomy 20 abnormalities, respectively.  The cells in our bodies contain pairs of chromosomes.  23 pairs to be exact.  With a Trisomy abnormality, there are 3 copies of the particular chromosome instead of 2 (chromosome 16 and chromosome 20 in the case of our two embryos.)  Wikipedia tells me that Trisomy 16 is the most common trisomy leading to miscarriage.  We no want... and we are grateful for this information.

At this point int the process, we are happy.  Very happy.  Very, very happy.  No - we're not pregnant yet, but with 4 frozen embryos we have a very, very good shot at becoming pregnant and having a couple of kids.  And that's all I've ever wanted.

The next step of the journey is of course embryo transfer.  We will have the 5AA, 5BB (from cycle 1), 2AA and 2AB to select from, but Dr. A is advising the 5AA because it looks so dang good!  She thinks at least 85-90% chance of success with that one!  And the same goes for the 2AA and 2AB as well.  Our 5BB is rounding at about 70% chance of success - all of them look great, overall.

I promise I will come back and update when we start down the transfer path - but right now it's looking like we'll be waiting until April/May due to some travel plans we've had on the calendar.  Plus I'd also like to try to avoid having a Christmas or New Years baby - I've heard many complaints from 2 good friends with December birthdays and it's just something I'd rather not do to my kid if I can help it...  And we CAN help it!  We can keep our little piggies on ice and thaw them out when the time is right for us (which is the truly great part of all of of this!)  

Please feel free to continue to leave comments as I will absolutely receive them, read them and appreciate them!  Thanks so much to all of you for your thoughts & prayers, sweet comments, happy wishes and for even just stopping to say hello.  I started this blog to keep track of this process for myself - but the idea that I've helped even one person along their own IVF journey makes me so happy.  Don't worry, I'll be back!!  (no really, I WILL!)