Day 3 Post Retrieval

I know this post is a bit after when I had said it would be, but something we hadn’t planned for had occurred so I was wanting more information before I posted. As I mentioned on Facebook we had 38 eggs retrieved which is kind of awesome. I am still kind of recovering from the whole process, I seem to have developed at least a mild case of Ovarian Hyper-Stimulation Syndrome which means more discomfort than normal. What we hadn’t planned for was instead of only making as many embryos as we needed for each transfer as planned they tried fertilizing half of the 38 ‘naturally’ (i.e. stick them in a petri dish and see what happens) and half using ICSI which is basically injecting a sperm into the egg. This left us with 13 embryos on Wednesday, which was not what we wanted. The reason for only 12 was the half that they tried to fertilize naturally didn’t fertilize at all, this means we know why we weren’t getting pregnant though. For some reason Matthew’s sperm simply can’t fertilize my eggs. We are understandably frustrated that the plan we had worked out with Dr. Amols wasn’t what happened, but it’s too late to do anything about it now so we are giving it up to God. He has a plan and perhaps any left over embryos we have will help another couple have the baby they have been praying for.

We got another phone call today with our day-3 embryo update. Apparently some of the eggs fertilized late so we are now at a total of 22 embryos, though 6 are graded as excellent, 6 are good, 2 are fair, and 8 are poor. The nurse I spoke to today said that after today is when the embryos that have fatal genetic defects will start to not survive. We will find out Sunday how many of our little embryos survived to be frozen in preparation of our transfer.

While we may not understand God’s plan for us or our embryos, we are trusting Him to protect us and show us His will for our family. We sincerely appreciate all of the prayers and support we have been receiving from everyone, and I especially appreciate everyone who has let me rant about this whole process to them.