Transfer report from the petri dish: surprise!

I spent the morning apprehensively working on my dissertation, fearing everytime the phone rang that it would be my RE, telling me he was sorry but the transfer was off because both embryos had arrested. As the morning crept into early afternoon and no call came, I started to relax a little. Looked like we were going to make it to transfer after all, thankfully.

Around 2pm, Will and I arrived at the IVF surgical suite, a mixture of relieved that the transfer hadn't been canceled and a little hangdog that we only had two embryos (at most) to transfer.

I sat in my hospital pajamas trying to distract myself, but not doing a very good job. I kept wondering is it one? is it two? one? two? how fragmented? and on and on. I reminded myself of a couple of stories I know where someone transferred only one and got a baby out of it, and I thought of some of your awesome comments, sharing stories of transferring two and getting pregnant. Thank you for those.

When I got called into the transfer room, my RE was nonchalantly talking about the embryos with his back to me. "All three are looking pretty good," he said, as I looked around behind me to see who else he might have been talking to.

"Three?"

We went round and round. There were definitely three. He didn't know if one fertilized late or if I was just given the wrong information before. I joked that maybe they'd decided to throw in one of somebody else's, just to cut me a break already. No one seemed to find that funny but me.

So there are three - that's 50% more than we were expecting! And the three are now transferred out of their cozy coculture medium and into the real deal - a veritable sea of uterine tissue, not just a few of my cells lining a dish. (One of the RE's described the scale between the embryo and the uterine lining to me as a tennis ball in a football field, which I thought was kind of cool).

My RE said that among these embryos is one that is grade 1 - the highest grade - and that the other two are grade 2. He says I have never produced a grade 1 embryo before. Ever.

Huh.

So without further ado, here they are, all three of them, in their glory: a 9 cell, an 8 cell, and a 7 cell.

Amazing how much different if feels to have three instead of two. I am so grateful. And although I don't want to get ahead of myself after having been disappointed so many times, I am even a little bit hopeful.

Fingers crossed. The two week wait starts now.

Mo