Each part of the IVF journey is hard, but IVF warriors don’t have any choice but to get through each step. So to review our infertility journey so far:
Diagnostic testing
Blood work
Ultrasounds
HSG
Next up, after the ovarian stimulation, is the egg retrieval surgery. I’ve spent a couple of weeks injecting myself multiple times a day with follicle stimulating hormones and other medicine to grow and develop as many eggs as possible. Now it was time to get them out!
The morning of my egg retrieval the first thing we had to do before heading to our fertility clinic’s surgery center was have J provide the ever-important “goods”. Let’s face it, besides having to deal with us crazy hormonal woman during IVF, the men have it pretty easy LOL. So once the goods were ready we headed off to the surgery center. I was admitted and they started my IVF. Unfortunately my doctor was out of town so I had to have one of the other doctors from my clinic perform the procedure. She came in and explained to J and I what was going to happen. We also met with the anesthesiologist to go over my medical history.
I was trying to keep my cool and stay strong, but inside I was so scared! This was it. Because of the cost of stimming and egg retrievals (this is the most expensive part of IVF), we probably only had one shot at this. I had so many what-ifs running through my head….
What if they don’t get any eggs?
What if the eggs they do retrieve aren't of good quality?
What is the eggs can’t be fertilized?
What if we went through all of this for nothing?
How do I tell J that this didn’t work?
What if this does work and we get some good eggs? Will we be able to get pregnant?
So as they escorted me into the surgery room and I left J behind, I was fighting back tears. I wasn’t even afraid of the surgery, just the unknown of how this was all going to turn out. But at this point, there was nothing more I could do but be put to sleep and start the egg retrieval surgery.
Once I was asleep, the 30 minute procedure began. The doctor went to each ovary and collected the fluid from each follicle. The way it was explained to me was a small needle pokes each follicle and they suck out the fluid from each (the egg is located in the fluid). Sometimes follicles are hiding behind others so it can be a tricky procedure to access each one. Because of this, everyone’s level of discomfort and pain after the surgery varies. In theory, the more follicles you have that they are poking the more pain you will probably be in. For me, as soon as I woke up in recovery I was in a great deal of pain. So much so that they sent J to the pharmacy to get stronger pain medications than what they had originally prescribed me. They also decided to have me continue my Cetrotide injections that night and the next day to help with preventing OHSS (Ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome). And to think I was done with injections! I will talk about my egg retrieval recovery in a future blog post so stay tuned for that.
So what about the eggs you ask? Here’s what happens after the egg retrieval surgery. Embryologists (experts in the science of oocyte cryopreservation a.k.a. egg freezing) search the follicular fluid in search for eggs. The eggs that are found are cleaned and placed in an incubator. Later that day the eggs are fertilized by either standard insemination or ICSI. Standard insemination involves placing the egg and the sperm in a culture dish together in hopes they will fertilize naturally. ICSI (Intracytoplasmic sperm injection) is a procedure in which, after egg maturity and quality have been evaluated (only mature eggs can have a chance at fertilizing), a single sperm is inserted directly into the mature egg. In our case, all of our mature eggs were fertilized by ICSI.
The fertilized eggs are cultured for up to 6 days in a temperature controlled incubator. Each day the embryology lab will evaluate their quality and development. Because we were not doing a fresh transfer (which means transferring back embryos days after the egg retrieval surgery), any embryos that survived and thrived would be frozen at the end of the week for future FETs (frozen embryo transfers). So here were our results:
Sept 15 (day of retrieval): 21 eggs retrieved; 18 of them were mature
Sept 16: 15 fertilized
Sept 18: 2 more had fertilized = 17 fertilized embryos of fair-good quality
Sept 20: Froze 4 hatching good/good blastocysts and 4 expanding good/good blastocysts; Still have 3 early blastocysts and 6 multicells to watch
Sept 21: Froze 1 more hatching good/good blastocyst
To sum it up, we have some of the highest rated embryos we could ask for and enough to give us a few good shots with frozen embryo transfers (the next step in the journey). For the first time ever, I felt a mother’s love. I know they are only early embryos and they were frozen like little ice cubes but I felt it in my heart. In those 9 frozen embryos (or what we like to call embabies), could be our future child/children. I was so grateful that we were given so many possible chances to become parents. Now...we wait until it’s time for our first transfer and see what these frozen embabies can do!
**This is not meant to be medical advice. Be sure to consult your doctor with any medical concerns. This is the account of my personal journey through infertility**
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