All of my efforts were rewarded this morning. To both the embryologist and the RE’s shock (literally he said it had been a long time since he’d seen blasts of this quality-while that should reassure me it doesn’t-our embryos in october got that same label)-we had 2 perfect blastocytes for transfer this morning:
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One is a late blast (left), with a nice thin wall which is just about ready to hatch and *hopefully* implant firmly into this uterus of mine. The other (right) is in the early blast stage and has just begun the process of compacting to turn into a late blast.
Things went smooth and with a very full bladder, the RE that ripped up the scar tissue with the camera last November grabbed this ultrasound shot of the exact moment the fisca blasts were transferred back to my protective care (they are the white flash in the center of the pink circle):
I need this to be it.
I need this to be it just as much as I need air to breathe.
I promise you if this isn’t it-I will reach up into my vagina in 8 days and rip this fucking uterus of death out of me and throw it in the trash.
Amen.
***** One final note to women who are reading this blog and wondering if they should push back against their RE’s suggestion( and or solid stance) on a 3 day embryo transfer…here is the most sucint info on prolonged embryo culture to the blastocyst stage and why it is so important to fight for this regardless of how insane it will make you (especially if you’ve already had a day 3 embryo transfer/s that didn’t result in a take home baby):
This is taken directly from haveababy.com (SIRM) which is one of the most successful ART centers in getting women knocked up with healthy take home babies…
This approach (growing to day 5 blast) aims at culling the poorer quality embryos over time. Thus embryos that survive to the blastocyst stage are more likely to be “competent”. The presumption has always been that it is better to transfer healthy embryos into the uterus sooner rather than later. Our recent research has clearly shown this to be an erroneous belief. In fact, with few exceptions, embryos that fail to progress to the blastocyst stage in culture are in most cases chromosomally abnormal and would not have been capable of propagating a healthy pregnancy anyway, even if they had been transferred earlier on. Since only about 40% of 6-9 cell embryos progress to blastocysts in culture, there might be an advantage in allowing embryos to grow to blastocysts in order to cull out the abnormal ones.
Simply stated, the major benefit of extending embryo culture by 1-2 additional days (to see if they make it to the blastocyst stage) is to naturally select the best-quality embryos. In the process, higher pregnancy rates can be achieved with fewer embryos and the risk of high-order multiple pregnancies (triplets or greater) can be reduced or eliminated in the process.