petri v. me

My heart ran away with my brains this past week.

Everything had been going so wonderfully, so *differently* from IVF #1. More than twice as many mature eggs retrieved, almost 3 times as many fertilized. Great fert reports, day after day after day. A 5 day transfer of 2 beautiful blasts, one of which was already beginning to hatch (and the other on which we performed assisted hatching).

The day prior to transfer we still had 5 morulas and multiple 12 and 10 cell embryos. We did some (admittedly very hopeful) math and figured we were certain to get some snowbabies out of the deal. We were a little surprised to learn on the day of transfer that they only expected one of our remaining blasts to make it into the freezer, but remained blindly optimistic that a few more might pull together and make the big chill.

When they didn't call yesterday with the frostie report I started to get a little nervous. And my fears were confirmed when this morning I learned that none of our original 11 embryos made it to the freeze.

In many ways this is no tragedy. I can't imagine we'd consider an FET with only one embryo anyway, and seeing as we'd paid for 2 fresh cycles in advance, we'd planned on doing another fresh first regardless. And yet, today, after this news, I feel fear and doubt and grief for the first time this cycle.

All I can wonder is how, if the embryos we left behind in the perfectly controlled lab were unable to survive, how will the 2 we have in my tempermental uterus have a fighting chance? We started with 12 and are down to 2. That's not a very good survival rate. I'm finding it difficult to put faith in our questionable DNA and my faulty organs.

I just don't know if they can turn this game around.