Egg retrieval went well yesterday! We got 21 eggs of which 16 "matured" and 13 were successfully fertilized!  I didn't do much yesterday other than lounging around so I wanted to send an update and go over the procedure and the next steps.

Yesterday we arrived at the clinic at 9:30 and met with the anesthesiologist. They used propofol for IV sedation and I was super worried about being nauseated after because I almost always am after anesthesia so he was really nice and gave me some IV zofran prophylactic. This totally worked and I had NO nausea! I was almost more worried about that part than the procedure itself lol.

The procedure took less than 30 min. They went in with a vaginal ultrasound probe with a needle attached and punctured through the vaginal wall into each ovary to suck out the fluid from each follicle that had developed. Most mature follicles that have grown larger than 16mm contain one egg but sometimes they may have none or they may have 2. I woke up pretty groggy but no pain!

We went and ate lunch and then I was pretty much ready for a nap. The rest of the afternoon I was really bloated, crampy and uncomfortable but nothing unmanageble. I feel the same today and anticipate this to improve each day.

Once the eggs were retreived they wait to see how many mature. An egg is mature when they spit out a little blurb that has the eggs DNA in it called a polar body. This part will later join with the DNA from the sperm to create 23 chromosomes for the baby (yes its Georges sperm but we wont get into that lol). Generally about 80% of eggs that are retrieved will mature.Then approx 80% of those will actually fertilize!

We will get our next call on Day 5 to see how many of the fertilized embryos survive! Once we have that final batch the embryologist grades each embryo based on a number of factors to determine which are the best ones. There are 2 parts of the embryo at this time. One part will become the baby and one part will become the placenta. Each part gets a letter from A-C. They are looking for an embryo which is at least graded BB to implant.

 

On day 5 the embryologist will take a small sample of cells from the matured blastocyst and send these off to the lab to be tested for chromosomal abnormalities. The whole blastocyst will be frozen until we are ready for the transfer!

It will take about 2 weeks to get back the genetic information for the embryos. They will even know the sex of each embryo!! However we have told them not to disclose this information to us because we still want to be surprised. We will give my body a few months to recover from this process and get back to "normal" after all of the hormones and we plan on transferring the best embryo in July!