Embryos?? Yes Please!!

WE HAVE EMBRYOS PEOPLE!! This is not a drill!!! 😄🎉🙏🏼🍾

Every step of this process has been different and more intense than the first time around. This week of growing embryos has kept me on my toes for sure! After the egg retrieval, the mature eggs are quickly fertilized and the growing begins! 🥚 My doctor calls with updates daily, except for day 4 (we will get to that later) because you typically lose some every day so its important to know what’s going on. It keeps you in a strange state of calm knowing that things are progressing even if you hear the number getting smaller.

Here’s a quick recap of what we knew in my last post → They retrieved 34 eggs, 23 of them were mature, and all 23 fertilized with Cliffs special men. Yay! The next day (Day 2), 21 of them were still growing and in the running to become future little Cliff and Danae’s! Now that we are all caught up.. lets continue..

The call we got on Day 3 was that we still had 17 little fighters and even better, 5 of them were already considered to be top quality! Woohoo! Grow babies grow! 😊 After that call, I was feeling pretty good about our chances at getting lots of embryos. Since that was the Day 3 update, I knew we would not get a call the next day. The growing process between day 3 and 4 is strange in the fact that they are no longer dividing where they can count the cells. Here’s a good picture to show what I am talking about..

(Picture used from this website: https://www.mivf.com.au/fertility-treatment/ivf-treatment)

As you can see, they go from countable cells on Day 3 to a cute little blob that provides no information whatsoever on Day 4. But this only makes the phone call on Day 5 even more exciting. Day 5 is when we find out the total number of embryos that we get to freeze for transfer. Since we had 17 on Day 3, I was thinking that even if we lose half of them (which is typical at the last stage) we would still end up with a good amount to freeze. Cliff and I were hoping for at least 6 because that would give us multiple transfer options. 🤞🏼

When my phone rang the morning of Day 5, I said “Here we go!” and answered the phone. The news I got was absolutely not what I was expecting. They said we had 3 beautiful top quality embryos that were being frozen that morning and I instantly had mixed feelings running through me. Now don’t get me wrong.. I was incredibly happy and grateful that we had 3 embryos. That’s one more than we got last time and would give us at least 2 rounds of transfer which is amazing and a blessing. 🙏🏼 I was just really expecting to get more than that and was a little shocked that we dwindled all the way down from 17 to 3.

But the conversation didn’t stop there.. They told me we had a handful of embryos that seemed to still be a little behind and they wanted to give them one more day to see if any of them would get to the final stage for freezing but not get our hopes up about that. 😕 Oh I know how this works.. you get your hopes up too high and then get them crushed and its devastating so I was not about to do that to myself.. again lol. I decided not to count on any more and focused on just being excited about the 3 we had. And really if you think about it.. 3 might be all we need! We absolutely were not looking to have 17 kids so I figured maybe God just picked out the 3 we needed and that was that!

Fast forward to the next morning.. Right after getting blood work done, I saw my doctors office was calling me. I was prepared to hear that nothing changed and 3 was in fact our final frozen embryo number. But once again, the news was not what I was expecting and boy was I glad to be wrong. They explained that during the previous afternoon, 3 more of our embryos were able to be frozen and on top of that, 3 additional embryos were ready to go that morning as well!!!! WE HAVE A TOTAL OF 9 EMBRYOS FROZEN!!!!!!!!!! 9 Embryos!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! ← that’s me freaking out with excitement all over again 😄💕💃🏼

I instantly burst into tears and felt an overwhelming sense of relief wash over me. Every second of pain, struggling, shots, and tears was worth it. Almost a week later and I was still recovering from the egg growing and retrieval process but I don’t care about any of that. We have 9 precious little ones that fought hard and made it all the way to the freezing stage because we didn’t give up. I loved one of Cliff’s statements after we heard the good news. He said, “Hmm.. so we are probably going to get at least one kid out of those huh??” hahaha Yes honey.. we just might 😍

My next post will go over where we go from here but I absolutely have to do one thing before I end this one. And that is to brag that I have the greatest mommy on the planet!🙂 (I love this picture of us from our wedding!) Cliffs job has him working out of town for weeks at a time and he was not able to be home for the retrieval. So mommy came to the rescue! She dropped everything and spent the last week taking care of me and our doggies. After the 1st retrieval, I was relatively back to normal in a day or 2. With this retrieval, I was lucky to make it from my bed to the couch during the first few days. Everything hurt, walking around could only be done in short bursts, and even the simplest household tasks were really not an option. But she is incredible and took care of everything. Making me food, cleaning up our house, feeding and playing with our dogs, laundry, dishes.. the list of things she did is endless! I’m fortunate to work from home and when I was feeling a little better, she even set me up on the couch with my computer so I could get some work done. I pray that one day I can be the kind of mom to my kids that she is to me. We could not have gone through and survived this retrieval without her and I am SO lucky to have her as my mommy and best friend. I love you mommy!!! Thank you!!! ♥