Day 10: Embryo Math

It's day 10 of our trip, and our 8 embryos are multiplying under God's watch in the care of the Shady Grove lab. There they were....1x2=2; 2x2=4; ...while they were busy working on their elementary math skills, we received a phone call report this morning on their progress; and we have seven that are still growing along with one having made it's way to heaven. Of the seven,

their first report card looked like:

5-cell

4-cell

4-cell (15% fragmentation)

2-cell

2-cell

2-cell (20% fragmentation)

2-cell

That is awesome...meaning we have 5 embryos with zero fragmentation and two that have what they consider mild degrees of fragmentation. For us, that was a great piece of news because all seven of our embryos for our cycle at Walter Reed had fragmentation. That put us on a great course to have at least one grade-1 embryo to transfer. Speaking of transfer, they have it set up for a 3-day transfer to happen tomorrow. While we might wish for a five day, the top three have clearly distinguished themselves as ahead of the pack and thus we don't need to wait the extra days for the frontrunners to highlight themselves...the best place for the embies (even though the lab is great at what they do) is the human body, so it's best to get them back where they belong as soon as you can...so absolutely no issues with having a 3-day transfer. So we will show at 1000 tomorrow for a 1030 appt time. We'll get one final report tomorrow morning before the transfer to let us know where they stand. Dr. Chang and our nurse Monica are extremely happy with our progress and are very hopeful for positive results based on how things have gone for us. While it's true that we had a good cycle at Walter Reed, we are even better off with this cycle because of the better quality of the embryos as well as Gena's E2 levels being far more under control than Walter Reed kept them. So it was great news today, and tomorrow we'll head over to the day care to pick up our children (well two, that is) and bring them home (to stay, hopefully). With our numbers, there is a solid chance that we will have one or two that make it to day 5 and will be eligible for cryopreservation...we'll know more on that on Saturday or Sunday. Here's to a successful transfer tomorrow.