10 retrieved; 9 mature!

Things went great with my sister this morning. Retrieval was scheduled for 8 a.m.; we had to be there at 6 a.m. so I stayed overnight last night at her house (arriving after the kids had gone to bed) and we got up at 4:30 this morning to make the hour (turned out to be about 45 minutes in minimal traffic) drive to the clinic.

Chit-chatted about everything after we got called back for her to change into gown, etc. Mr.Right even got to pop in to say hello around 7 a.m. after he had dropped off his contribution (and then he ran off to work.)

The doc who did her retrieval had done my first D&C (at that clinic), at least one of my IUIs and I think one of my retrievals as well. I'm not quite sure he remembered who I was at first but then he said he did. He did look a little perplexed about my 33week belly, so I asked him if he'd heard about our wacky story. Not sure if he had or whether he was being polite, but I guess he figured it out!

My sister came through with flying colors. I think she's taken the extra strength tylenol they gave her after she woke up and that's it.

She was dressed by 9 a.m. and we were walking out of the building. Stopped at Panera's for breakfast and then headed home to her house and took the dog for a walk and tennis ball throwing session. Then we went to Target to get goggles for my nephew and had lunch at a diner. About to leave in a minute to pick my younger nephew up from daycare (since she's not supposed to drive and my BIL has picked up older nephew to go to swim class.)

Anyhow, upshot is: 10 eggs retrieved and they called at around 1:30 p.m. to say 9 were mature. They'll be doing ICSI and we'll get a fertilization report tomorrow and then they'll be frozen '2 pn.' I'm not quite sure what that exactly means but basically we'll be freezing on day 1.

We had long-ish discussion with Dr. Dry about this last month and he called this past Saturday to confirm. Apparently there's some debate among embryologists about benefits of letting go til day 5 to freeze. But basically, we went for Day 1 freeze as my understanding was that that might give us some more flexibility out the other end to re-freeze. As I'm carrying this now 33 week old baby around I'm increasingly leery of putting even 2 embryos in whenever we get around to doing an FET. I'm just not sure I want to carry twins. So, we may just end up doing a series of single FETs and this would allow us to thaw a few, see what makes it and potentially re-freeze (one more time) if we get more than 1 that survives the thaw.

The only advantage of day 5 freeze might be to see whether any of the eggs make it that far and I could see why you might want to do that if you were planning to do another cycle, but we're not. This is the only time we're going to ask my sister to do this.

I guess the only risk we run is freezing a bunch of embryos that wouldn't have made it to day 5 and having none of them survive thaw/grow once thawed. But it's not like we're going to use them right away anyhow, so if that happens, we'll just immediately move on to anonymous donor eggs. No time really lost except to thaw the eggs.

Anyhow, we're very pleased! Crossing fingers for good fertilization tomorrow!