IVF: Rodney

The day after the egg retrieval, we were supposed to hear from our embryologist named Rodney.  As our embryologist, he was the one who used Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (aka ICSI) to fertilize my eggs with Adam's sperm.  In this process, an embryologist takes a single sperm and injects it directly into an egg.  

In traditional IVF, you just mix eggs and sperm in a dish and see what happens.  You may or may not end up with fertilized eggs with this approach.  But with ICSI, you make sure every egg has the opportunity to be fertilized.  It doesn't mean every egg will fertilize or turn into a viable embryo, but it greatly increases the chances.  When we asked about ICSI, our clinic told us that this is becoming the norm in IVF.  

So Rodney injected one of Adam's sperm into each of my 5 eggs that were retrieved on the day of the retrieval.  He watched over them and then called us the following day with a report.  

His phone call actually woke me up.  As soon as I heard the ring, I knew exactly who was calling so I tried to make sure I sounded awake when I answered.  Rodney's jolly voice told me he had some great news to share.  He said that 4 of my eggs had fertilized!  Once the eggs are fertilized, they are called embryos. So we now had 4 embryos!  This was great news!  He said he would call again in a few days with another update.  

For some reason, it just tickled me to think that this man named Rodney was watching over our embryos.

I got another call from Rodney two days later, which turned out to be even more great news!  He said that all four of our embryos were growing appropriately.  Maybe it was just in my head, but I felt like he was a bit surprised by this.  Given the fact that we only started out with 5 eggs and we still had 4 healthy embryos at this point was pretty awesome.

Rodney said although he couldn't make any promises, he was pretty certain we would have at least one viable embryo to transfer.  He said unless we heard from him, we should plan for our embryo transfer to occur on December 14, 2016.  

Now we had a big decision to make.  How many embryos should we transfer?  All along, Dr. Brabec said she would transfer one or two.  She had told us that given my age and other factors, I should be able to carry twins if we were to transfer two embryos and they both implanted.  I think we had both leaned towards transferring one embryo up until this point.  Obviously a twin pregnancy has the possibility of more complications.  But transferring two embryos would increase our chances of ending up with a singleton pregnancy.  

Source

Adam had called the fertility clinic and set up for us to come in and talk to Dr. Brabec about the number of embryos we should transfer prior to our embryo transfer.  One of the things I was supposed to do in preparation for the embryo transfer was to take a Valium.  We wanted to make sure I was coherent enough to make such a big decision before the Valium kicked in.  This was yet another example of how Adam stepped up during this whole, crazy process.  

I'll share all about our embryo transfer in the next post.