Updates

Many things in life aren't fair. Many times you're blindsided or sucker-punched, and it sucks when that happens. But I'm not giving up without a fair fight. We've fought long and hard at this, and I'm going to claw my way back up. 

I've spent a major portion of yesterday licking my wounds and feeling sorry for myself. Many of you came to my pity party - thanks for dropping by. Sorry I didn't serve good booze ;-)

Here's what has transpired since my last post.

I emailed the nurse at CCRM saying I was disappointed with our results and could she check if any of the immature eggs had any hope. She had the embryologist call me again. We went through all the numbers again.

Oocytes Retrieved: 31

Mature eggs: 24

ICSI done on: 24

The break down of the ICSIed eggs:

Normally fertilized: 14

Didn't survive the ICSI procedure due to being fragile: 2

Fertilized abnormally (with multiple nuclei / too much DNA): 6

Mature but damaged egg: 1

Mature but "giant" egg: 1

I asked the embryologist if we had any hopes of any of the other eggs maturing. She said she looked, and it did look like there were 2, possibly 3 that may mature. She would perform ICSI on them, and would call me today with the report. I asked her if it was normal to have so many abnormally fertilized with ICSI. She said it does seem like we had a large number. She also mentioned that some of our embryos are looking "vacuolated". I asked her what that meant, and she said "I'm not sure I know how to explain it, but it looks like your embryos have pockets or vacuoles". 

In 4 previous IVFs and several embryos that have been formed and tested and transferred, nobody has every mentioned a quality issue. No egg quality issue, no embryo quality issue. Yes, I accept that all those previous IVFs were done previously, ie, I was younger, if only by a few months. So has the downhill aging process caught up so quickly? 

Today, I emailed the sales rep at the insurance company who has been dealing with my ex employer. (I was put in touch with him yesterday by the HR assistant). He called and has confirmed that I do have infertility coverage, and he apologized for the bad information that was given to me. He said he would work with the concerned people to get me my pre-authorizations. He also wished me good luck with the cycle - I thought that was very sweet of him. I have given him all the information he needed, and now I'm waiting for him or someone from his team to get my authorizations done. Thankfully that's one step closer to closure. 

Then I called CCRM, and spoke with the embryologist. He said they managed to mature 4 more eggs, and did ICSI on all 4 yesterday. One of them is showing 2 cells today, but they're not sure if it is fertilized or not. (Huh???) The others don't seem to have done anything, but he will leave them in the culture and watch them to see if something happens. 

I asked him about the vacuolation and asked if it was a bad thing to have vacuolated embryos. He said it need not necessarily be a bad thing. It's just an observation, but that they really don't know much about vacuolation. 

So as of now, we have the 14, and possibly 1 additional that has done some sort of division.

They will call us tomorrow with Day 3 progress and will biopsy the embryos on Monday for PGD. We don't know what the outcome will be. I hope we will have at least something to transfer. 

I had got into this cycle thinking I was going to be ok with the knowledge that we tried all we could, no matter what the outcome. But it seems like I am a lot more invested into the process and a failure (God forbid) will be hard to take. 

We are back home in CA - for the first time this year! We saw Simba for the first time this year. I slept for 10 hours straight last night - I guess it's good to be home!