From Egg to Embryo

The In-between Days

 

Sorry I’ve been rather quiet since the egg collection day,  I had been planning to give more regular updates throughout this period.

The afternoon and evening of the egg collection I was pretty sore particularly when walking, weeing or laughing, Paracetamol seemed to work quite well and just as long as I propped myself up comfortably on the sofa I wasn’t too uncomfortable.

   

On the morning after the egg collection – the Thursday - I was waiting for a phone call from the clinic to update me on how my little eggs were getting along, I didn’t have to wait too long as they phoned about 9.30.  The average fertilisation rate at my clinic is about 70% so since they go 12 eggs I was perhaps expecting about 7 or 8 to have fertilised, I felt that anything above 8 would be brilliant.  When they called however I couldn’t believe it, 11 of the 12 had fertilised! I was so amazed and all day kept going to my husband and my Mum, 11, I can’t believe there’s 11.  At this point they could say with a reasonable amount of confidence that they’d be able to get at least one of the embryos to blastocyst stage for transfer on Monday although they said there was still a small chance that the transfer might need to be Saturday.  They therefore said that they wouldn’t phone me again on Friday but would call me on Saturday morning to confirm that the transfer would be Monday and give me a time.

After the good news about the eggs – well actually embryos by that point, the day after the egg collection I had a very chilled day, my Mum came over and we spent most of the day chilling on the sofa with some knitting and a film.  I felt pretty much fine so felt a bit of a fraud doing virtually nothing but still seemed a good idea to take it easy and let everything settle.

 

Friday I didn’t do a lot, just passing the day with various activities to try and keep my mind occupied.  I was actually feeling more uncomfortable and bloated that day than the preceding day.  That night I didn’t sleep that well, tossing and turning for about an hour because of how bloated I felt.  

Saturday I was waiting for a phone call from the clinic, they phoned fairly early again which was good.  I wasn’t sure what to expect at this point, I knew that it was likely that some of the embryos had stopped developing so I was absolutely thrilled when they said that all 11 were still developing though one of them wasn’t developing at the rate that they’d expect meaning essentially I still had 10 good embryos available.   As I’ve said before this is all essentially irrelevant if in the end the embryo doesn’t implant but it does mean that they should have enough left to freeze some.  With NHS funded IVF in my area you get 2 cycles of IVF funded but if they have enough frozen embryos left over you can have an ‘extra’ frozen cycle in between each fresh cycle meaning that having some embryos spare essentially means I get twice as many tries. The clinic then gave me a time for transfer on Monday and informed me that they wouldn’t look at the embryos again until then.

 

The rest of Saturday and Sunday was spent trying to relax I had a night away with my cousins which just happened to coincide with the wait so that was a good distraction.  The main problem I had over the weekend was that I was extremely bloated and uncomfortable. Every time I ate something I felt uncomfortably bloated, full and a bit sick.  I was beginning to get a bit worried about ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome – which until I looked it up I didn’t realise generally starts around 4 days or so after egg collection.  Not wanting to go into too much detail however lets just say that I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s nothing that can’t be solved with a bit of prune juice!

Transfer Day

 

So after 5 long days of waiting, transfer day has finally arrived.  I’d been given a time of 1.30pm for the transfer and I had to be at the clinic for 1pm.  The morning did rather drag, especially as Matt was asleep after working a night so I didn’t have anybody to keep me company.  I filled the time watching a film and doing a bit or crochet to keep myself busy.   

"You can leave your socks on."

When we arrived at the clinic we went into the same place that we'd gone for the egg collection and got changed into a gown and Matt put on a  gown and overshoes over his clothes so that he could come with me.  They went through when to do a pregnancy test, what to do if it’s positive and what to do if it’s negative before the procedure.

 

When it was time to go down for the transfer we walked along to the same room where the egg collection was done but Matt was able to come with me this time.  The Dr talked me through the procedure, it did make me chuckle when he mentioned something about me getting into the ‘normal position’ because I don’t think there’s many people who’d consider laying on your back with your feet up in stirrups a normal position but it has become that over the last few weeks!

The embryologist then came in to tell me about the grades of the embryos – all 11 were still alive and the good news was that there was one very good one which was a 5BB, I wont go into the details of embryo classification as I don’t really understand in that well but all you really need to know is that the ‘5’ bit is very good and the ‘BB’ is OK.  The other part of the news wasn’t so good as all the other embryos aren’t looking great so they may not be able to freeze any but they’ll leave them to develop for another day and let me know.  This is disappointing because as I said earlier it would have been nice to have some spares in case this doesn’t work but what I tired to focus on is that the one that they put in is good, after all if they didn’t have that one good one then they’d have had to put one of the poorer quality ones in today.

For the procedure itself you don’t have any pain relief or sedation.  It’s rather uncomfortable but I wouldn’t say it was painful as such.  It's more all the preparation and getting everything in the right position that is uncomfortable whereas the procedure itself isn’t too bad.  Once I was in position they made sure I was able to see the screen and put a small catheter into my uterus, I could see this going in on the ultra sound.  The ultra sound itself wasn't very comfortable as you have to have a full bladder for the procedure and the ultrasound pushing on mystomach really makes you need to pee!  Once the catheter was in they squirted the fluid which contains the embryo down the tube into my uterus, we could see it going in as a little white squirt of fluid.  The catheter wass then removed but I had to stay in position while the embryolosit checked the tube under the microscope to make sure that the embryo had been carried in properly with the fluid and wasn’t stuck in the tube, apparently this can happen in 10% of cases and they then have to flush it through again.  Once they’d established that it’s all gone in ok everything was removed.

After the procedure we went back to the recovery room and I got dressed and had a much needed wee.  I automatically felt like I wanted to keep my legs crossed and walk like a penguin because I felt like  the embryo was just going to fall out, which of course is complete nonsense!  Once dressed that was it and we were free to go.

The 2 Week Wait

 

The 2 week wait isn’t actually a 2 week wait as it’s 15 days calculated from the time of the egg collection so it’s 10 days from now.  At the moment all I feel I want to do is chill out at

home and eat all the treats Matt has brought me from Waitrose – I’d asked for a chocolate orange but did rather well out of the fact that they didn’t have any as I got about 4 different treats instead, I will of course also be having a super healthy dinner.  There’s no evidence that laying down or bed rest helps at this stage otherwise I’d be up in bed right now, they just advise to take it easy, don’t lift anything heavy but carry on with life as normal, so that’s what I’ll be doing, trying to carry on life as normal even though I’ve never felt less normal in all my life!