How Many Made It - Final Embryo Count

My calm feelings went out the window last night. All throughout the night, I was in and out of dreams, worrying and wondering what they would tell me about my embryos. I was feeling so afraid of them telling me that I had none that had progressed. Zero. That all my hopes would be on the two embryos inside of me and that's it. All my time and money was on this one chance.

I kept trying to be reasonable. You try to make safe guesses so you don't set yourself up for heartache. I kept shooting for two embryos. That seemed pretty safe to me. Maybe one of my beautiful oval ones would work out, and maybe one of my fair-grade ones. I would love more, like four or five. But two felt safer, and I couldn't go any lower than that without knowing I would be bummed either way, even if I prepared myself for it.

The phone rang in the morning. I looked at the number and felt my anxiety rise. This was it. This was when you had to be ready to be pleasantly surprised or utterly disappointed, even devastated. I said a quick prayer before answering, asking God to help me be okay with whatever they told me.

My fears soon dissolved as the embryologist said, "I have excellent news for you." Phew! Wonderful! Excellent news? I must have four or five embryos that made it because that would most certainly be excellent! I grabbed my little note pad and a pen and got ready to write down whatever she was about to tell me, how many embryos and what stage they were at and what grade they got.

"We were able to freeze one embryo."

Wait, what? One? Just one? How is it excellent that I lost eight of my nine remaining embryos?

I waited for her to say something else, to tell me they were watching a few others for a few more hours, that they were going to freeze a few more in just a little bit, or something! But she didn't. No. It was just one.

My heart sank.

They told me that the others didn't have enough cells, or they were very poor-grade embryos, or they hadn't made it to the right stage. I guess they need to meet certain criteria in order to be frozen and my embryos didn't measure up. It made me sad to think of these embryos that had tried. I wish I could have seen them. I wish I could have said to them, "Thanks for trying, for working so hard. I'm so sorry I didn't get to meet you. But I wanted to get a look at your beautiful self before saying goodbye."

So much money. So much time. So many hopes. Disintegrating, breaking down, falling apart. My little embryos that couldn't make it.

There's still some hope, of course. The good news is, they told me that this one little embryo was a very good looking embryo. Maybe that's my little girl right there, the one that will make it all the way.

The bad news is, the oval ones didn't make it, so I don't have much hope for the oval one inside of me. Even though they looked perfect otherwise, they didn't progress like they should. You never know how it'll turn out, never know with any of this process. I have a little bit of hope for the other one we put in. I have a little bit of hope for the one they froze. But it's not much to gamble with, not much at all.

All things being equal, a woman my age has about a 30-35% chance of having a baby with an in vitro cycle. All I can do now it wait and see if I become pregnant, see if I can get myself into that 30% group and give Gavin a sibling.

My blood test will be October 17th, with lots of waiting and hoping in between.