18 cells heavier

Today was our embryo transfer for our FET. We put back three 3-day embryos, a 5B, 6B, and 7B and now all there is really left to do is hope and pray that 1 or 2 (or 3?!?! eek) will stick and thrive and blossom into souls we will have the privilege of meeting again come spring.

I wrote before how the original plan was to thaw the straw with the 2 embryos that remained from those that were fertilized by regular IVF, an 8B and 5BC. It seemed really questionable, though, whether the 5BC would even have a decent chance of surviving thaw. I still find it odd that they bothered to freeze the 5BC at all. Instead, they decide to thaw all 3 of our ICSI embryos, which were originally rated 8B, 9B, and 9B. All three survived thaw, but not without sustaining battle wounds: one 9B became a 5B, one 9B became a 7B, and the 8B became a 6B. Since none of them survived fully intact, we decided to transfer 3.

To be honest, I had a pretty naive and uninformed view of the thawing process - I thought the embryo would either thaw intact (a viable embryo) or not (a non-viable embryo). I was oblivious to all of the shades of gray in the thawing process - that some of the cells could die, but that if over 50% of the cells remained alive, the embryo would still be considered viable.

No one told us the embryos looked good or said we had an excellent chance or anything like that. Honestly, I don't think our chances of a live baby from this cycle are that great but I always have to keep hoping that this is the time that things will be different...

fert report - 67%

I got my fertilization report about 30 minutes ago. I was getting so nervous and antsy waiting for the news, especially since I had no idea what to expect at all. I mean, with the retrieval I was already going in with a fair amount of information from my last ultrasound about what to expect. I knew to expect 11 eggs and that anything more would be a bonus and anything less would be a little disappointing. In comparison, the question of how many eggs would be fertilized just felt like a black box! Anyhow, 8/12 of our eggs fertilized, which is better than I was expecting - that is a 67% fertilization rate.

We did a split batch - half ICSI and half left to fertilize naturally. Interestingly, the results were the same between both batchs - 4/6 that were ICSI'd became embryos and 4/6 that were left to fertilize naturally became embryos. We go back in on Wednesday at 10:30am for our transfer. Right now I am just trying to go with the flow and hoping for the best.