So the transfer has finally happened today, and I have good news and bad news.
The good news first.
One of my embryos had reached blastocyst form, which is the ideal stage for embryos to be transferred, and that is why we had to wait for day-5 transfer rather than day-3.
And that’s where the good news end.
The bad news next.
Well, they are not “bad-bad”, but not what we were expecting. It turns out that alongside the blastocyst, I had one embryo at “morula” stage, which is not as good as blastocyst but it is the next best thing. The embryologist and the nurses recommended to transfer both of them to maximise the chance of pregnancy (basically, they didn’t want me to risk just going for the one embryo in case it failed). The problem with this? High risk of twins (see my previous post)
But twins is not a certainty. It may happen that the morula will help the blastocyte prosper without actually turning into a developing fetus. Which would bring us to the desired ending: one healthy baby.
The other piece of “bad” news is that the rest of the embryos that fertilised weren’t good quality, two of them stopped developing on day 2 and one which reached morula stage wasn’t as good as the other one and they don’t think it will continue developing, and for that reason there aren’t any embryos for freezing.
The ideal situation would have been to have one or two morula stage embryos that could be frozen, because if this cycle of IVF is not successful then that would have saved us a lot of money on a second cycle in the future (as our PCT/NHS will only fund one cycle… Any future ones would have to come out of our own pockets)
So, what happened today?
We got to the Freya Centre with plenty of time and waited to be called. We then went downstairs and talked to the embryologist and the nurses about the embryos, and all the things that I’ve already told you above. When we were asked the question of how many embryos we wanted to transfer I kept saying one, but Jon and I had already discussed that at all times we would go with the expert’s recommendation whatever that would be. In this case their recommendation was to transfer two. So after a very short discussion between us, we agreed that we would go with their decision. Two.
I then partly undressed and sat in the chair with my legs up… Ugh… The beginning of the process is the same as a smear test.. However, maybe because I was extremely nervous, this time it hurt a lot. Thank god Jon was there beside me all the time, because I was a bit in distress.
Then they inserted a fine tube through the cervix with the help of ultrasound. The embryos were passed down the tube into the womb and Jon could see all of this via the monitor! Lucky him.
It was all done in ten minutes and then we were told that it was better if I took it easy for the next couple of days – so no visit to Ikea this afternoon… we headed straight home.
What are the next steps?
I continue the crinone gel for a couple more weeks, and then…. The pregnancy test! 12 days from today. That’s on Monday October 8th. So probably there won’t be more IVF related posts until then!
Oh, below, a souvenir from the Clinic 🙂 The arrow points at a white blob, which is the two transferred embryos!
