We have arrived!

It happened! I'm sorry I left you all in the lurch last week so let me rewind and give you an idea of how the trigger and transfer went. So at last we met, I had been for monitoring on Monday morning and the eggys weren't quite ready. I've got to admit that as we drew closer to the trigger I progressively felt more and more yucky.  I guess since my ovaries were so enlarged and stimulated it translated into feeling wildly bloated, nauseous and icky! We went back to Delaware on Tuesday morning and by 4pm that afternoon we had big news...

TRIGGER TIME!

So at 12:15 Tuesday night, Matt gave me a giant needle full of Progesterone in my bum! It wasn't as bad as I had anticipated and after 36 hours of waiting we headed to RAD for my retrieval. Now, Adrienne gave me the strict orders to stay off the internet and not read anything about IVF cycles and to DEFINITELY not post on any forums..so I didn't. I went into the retrieval without any outside opinions. They put me partially under, in a twilight state...I wish I would have been knocked out completely, because to put it lightly, the retrieval sucked. Bad. I had a tender spot on my left ovary and Adrienne could tell, even with me under, that it bothered me so she did the whole procedure and saved that for the end. Of course that is the part I remember. It felt like an eternity, but apparently it only lasted a minute or so!

With the retrieval under our belts, we found out that I produced 21 eggs! And you all thought I was being dramatic about being a hen!  Of the 21, 16 were mature. This means that 5 of the eggs were unable to be fertilized.  On Thursday afternoon the lab fertilized my 16 eggs with a fresh sample that Matt (obviously) gave them that morning.  RAD uses a fertilization technique called ICSI(intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, a process that involves injecting a single sperm into each egg) as opposed to putting some sperm in a dish with an egg and letting them battle it out.  Something worked, because by Friday we had 14 embryos (embyBROS as Matt calls them) and on Sunday during the 3 day check we still had 14 healthy babies in training.  Yesterday we went for the transfer.  In the morning we had 5 "beautiful"(Adrienne's word) embryos.  By the time we arrived at RAD at 2pm, we had 7 embyBros for freezing!  Doctors say that of the fertilized embryos that survive to day 3, 40-60% will survive to transfer/freezing.  The lab also rechecks the embryos on day 6.  So with all of that being said, we hit the 50% mark on day 5 and then Adrienne texted this morning to let me know that we sent 3 more to the freezer! 10 embryos in the freezer! And don't forget the transfer was yesterday, so of our 16 mature eggs, 14 fertilized and 11...11 survived! We are over the moon!

Ok, so the transfer was by far the easiest part of this entire process. We went in around 2 and walked out around 3...after they made me lay flat for 45 minutes!  Adrienne came in before hand to show us a picture of our little embybro that was being transferred.  She said it was beautiful and that she couldn't have asked for more from this cycle. We have a picture of the embryo for the fridge...is that weird?  After my 24 hours bed rest, I am ready to head back to work and stay busy...no pregnancy test for a while! I will post the picture of the little embybro later in another post and we can talk about all it's beautiful traits!

That's enough for now!
xoxo