Previous: Fertility Part 21: Follicles

We drove into Vancouver in the morning, April 2,2024. The night before felt strange, not having any other injections to do, but it was oddly relieving as well. We got checked in pretty quickly and set up in a prep and recovery bay. They came to take her blood pressure and other vitals, talked through the entire procedure, and put in her IV.

Andrea had a blown vein from recent blood work and was hoping to get the IV in the other arm, but they couldn’t find a vein and had to use the one that hurt.  As I watched her, I could tell it was slightly painful and I just felt my heart swell with love for her. The amount of shots she’s had to take, bruising, testing, etc. It’s so much and I am so sorry she has to go through it all.

When the nurse left, I just kept staring at my wife thinking about how grateful I am that she’s willing to go through this to have a child. I started to tear up and just loved her so very much in that moment.

Infertility is so difficult and different for everyone. For me, one thing that it has done is show me just how much my wife loves me. The infertility is my “fault” and yet she’s the one who bears the brunt of it. She takes the meds, she tracks the schedule, she needs injections, she has the medical procedures. It’s her body that does everything, and I basically just had to choose some donor sperm from an internet catalog.

She likely would have had a much smoother path to children with another partner, but she loves me so much and wants children with me so badly that she’s willing to go through all of this.

That’s pretty special. 

From the moment they took her from the room to the time she returned was about 30 minutes. It took a little bit of time for her to wake up fully from the drugs that she was given. During this time, they extract every egg from its follicle with a long needle and flush fluid through the equipment to make sure no egg gets left behind in the tubing.

Upon her return to the room, she just kept telling me how wonderful it was to have a heating pad and how many different types of snacks she wanted me to pick up for her on the way home. It was adorable.

After a small wait, the nurse came back to us with the final egg count from the embryologist. We would be told a bit more information about the process in the coming days.

In other areas such as the US, it’s pretty common for people to be called or given an update every day as the embryos progress, but for us we were only given 2 main updates. One would be the following day to tell us the state of the eggs, and the other would be on day 6 to tell us how many embryos we have at the end.

Once they retrieve the eggs, they have to see how many are actually mature enough to attempt fertilization. Once the sperm meets the eggs, it’s all up in the air how many will actually successfully fertilize and continue to grow into an embryo called a Blastocyst which gets frozen and later transferred to hopefully become a successful pregnancy.

12 eggs were retrieved.
10 were mature.
8 fertilized successfully.
7 embryos frozen.

Of our 7 embryos, 4 were frozen on Day 5, and 3 were Day 6.

Overall we were absolutely over the moon to have 7 frozen embryos. It was more than we hoped for and it felt like this was the best news we could have ever received. So many people have difficulties getting even just one embryo. We were very grateful to end up with 7.

Many times it’s normal for embryos to be tested to make sure all the chromosomes are present (Euploid embryo) or if there are any missing (Anaeuploid embryo). However for us this would have been an extra ~$800 per embryo which is absolutely money we did not have. Thankfully the doctor did not think there would be a reason to test since we were only dealing with male infertility and using donor sperm. So we were able to save ourselves an extra ~$5600, which would leave enough money to actually be able to transfer some of these embryos.

Embryos are not babies.

But it feels like we now have some real hope of having one some day.

Next: Embryo Transfer #1