Waiting for the call

I think I woke up about 5 times last night, each time remembering that we were done with the ER (yay!) and today is The Call.

There are so many things you wait for when going through an IVF cycle, but there are three major hurdles: 1) egg retrieval. Many women have their cycles cancelled before ER for one reason or another, and many women have an ER but don't get mature eggs. The fact that we got 9 mature eggs is huge. Additionally, that may shine a light on one of the possible reasons we haven't been able to get pregnant - I had about 15-18 follicles, but only 9 eggs.

2) The First Call: which for us is today. The embryology lab will check the eggs today and will be able to find out how many fertilized. Doc recommended not doing ISCI at all, even if we only had 8 or 9 eggs. Initially, Embro recommended ICSI unless we had 15 or more eggs. But he changed his mind when he saw the eggs - and we are hoping and praying that all nine of those beauties fertilized last night. Generally, 75% of all eggs that you attempt to fertilize do, and the survival rate of the embies goes down daily so you want a larger number to fertilize than you actually hope to transfer.

3) Getting to Transfer: if we do have embies today, we may transfer on Sunday, and if the embies look great, we may push that to Tuesday so we do a blastocyst transfer. Generally 20% of the eggs you attempt to fertilize make it to blast transfer - and we're hoping that we make it with two blasts. If we only have a few embies, though, they will probably want to do a day 3 transfer, and if so we'd transfer all the embies we have - realizing that most likely not all of them will survive.

Once you get to transfer, the two week wait begins - but at least with that you can take a home pregnancy test after about 10 days to see if it worked, or to prepare yourself for the bad call from the clinic. But we're thinking hopefully here! I'd much rather take a test at home and know right away that I'm pregnant and then have the clinic confirm that by a blood test.

So for now, we wait for The Call...