Chromosomes!

I managed to pick up a pretty nasty spring cold thanks to my lovely La. This means we are both sick, which is really the worst part of catching sickness from one another. La is a beautiful, amazing, brilliant caretaker. . .when she is well. When she is sick, she is bratty and needy. And this is fine when she is sick and I am well, but doesn’t work out so well when we are both down for the count. Needless to say, when people ask if we ever want to get pregnant at the same time (which happens ALL.THE.TIME.), the answer is a resounding NO. (I did just find a blog of two women who DID get knocked up simultaneously – doing reciprocal IVF for them both, which is quite poetic, and seems to be working for them. So, its not a universal eye roll) 

So I was awake but hating life at 7:45am when the clinic called with the results of our PGS screening. I could also hardly talk through my dry mouth and snot filled head, but that’s ok cause I didn’t have to talk much.

Of the 8 embryos sent for biopsy, four came back normal. FOUR. This seems like an awfully high proportion of good:bad, but once again, no one* seems to be worried, so I am trying to also not be worried. Of the four that are normal, one of them has a lower ‘confidence rating’ on an abornormality, which means, according to the embryologist, ‘that wouldn’t be the first one we put in’ but that it also didn’t mean we wouldn’t transfer it. Of the four good embryos, two are XX (one of which is the lower confidence embryo) and two are XY – meaning because we are not choosing, our chances of getting a boy (or, I should say, a baby with XY chromosomes who is likely to be assigned male at birth) are slightly higher. My mom probably doesn’t need to know that.

Of the four that were abnormal, one had so many problems it almost certainly wouldn’t have even implanted, one had trisomy 21, and the other two had other trisomies that I wasn’t familiar with. All abnormalities came from the egg – which of course will give you a complex even when the embryologist tells you this is common since the egg is older and a more complex structure in which more things can go wrong.

So, mostly I am glad we did the PGS, since without it we had about a 50/50 chance of having an embryo transferred that would have miscarried or had some other issues. The attrition in this process is astounding though. From 53 eggs retrieved, 29 mature eggs, 21 of which fertilized, 12 of which grew to day 5, 9 of which were able to be frozen, 8 of which were biopsied, four of which are chromosomally normal. 7% of the harvested eggs turned into (we hope) viable embryos (if my math is good. so, maybe less actually)

Now, I’m going to finish some e-mails and try and blow some snot outta my brain.