Tuesday, July 12, 2011

CD14 - On the Way to Embryo Transfer?

Work has been keeping me very busy (which probably is a good thing), so I haven't been able to post any updates until now. After the last check-up I wrote about, I had two more and both continued to show promising news:

SD7 (CD9): Three follicles (16, 15, 14); E2 was 675.
SD8 (CD10): Three follices (18, 18, 15); E2 was 795.

I then triggered on Friday night (CD10). Actually, my wonderful former nurse, Emily, came to my home to give me my trigger and boy did she do a great job! My HCG on the following morning was 220. The nurse who called with my bloodwork results said that whoever gave me my trigger must have known what she was doing! And it seems as though she got the job done because Dr. Sacks was able to retrieve TWO eggs during egg retrieval on Sunday morning!

However, the roller coaster ride continues...just one egg ended up fertilizing. I emailed Dr. Sacks for more details about both eggs and he told me the following: "I looked this morning. The one embryo that did fertilize looks good. The other egg was mature and injected with the sperm, but this morning there was no sign of fertilization and the egg was rather dark and poor quality. I’ll continue to watch the embryo and look forward to seeing you on Wednesday for the transfer." After I receievd that email, I felt more hopeful despite having just one of the eggs fertilize since at least the egg that did fertilize looked good and that he expected to see me for transfer!

But then the story took another turn - the nurse who called me this morning to give me another update burst my bubble yet again. She simply told me that the embryo is still growing and that I will receive a call later this afternoon about the the time of my embryo transfer tomorrow. I then had to ask her how the embryo looked today. She told me that it had two cells and didn't offer any more information - or compassion. Aside from her bluntness, this was pretty discouraging news because Murtle was a 4-cell embryo at this stage of the game. I think that even my only embryo from my failed IVF attempt this past fall was 4-cells on the second day after transfer, too. Anyway, this nurse then rudely rushed to get off the phone. I can understand her not wanting to give me bad news, but at least try to show some compassion. Not only is the IVF process expensive, we are talking about people's potential future children here! Plus, I had assumed the news was bad yesterday based on the fertilization report I received from her, yet Dr. Sacks was able to give me the real story. I am hoping that the real story is when they called to tell me about Murtle, it was later in the afternoon, so she may have also just been 2-cells in the morning, but expanded to 4-cells by the time I received the update. There is a big difference between a 2-cell and a 4-cell embryo two days after egg retrieval. It would have been nice for this nurse to offer that information - or any information. I wonder if she's simply clueless about things. When I asked her yesterday if the reason one egg didn't fertilize was because it was immature and if it then matured, would they still try to ICSI it, she told me that it was immature and that they wouldn't ICSI it since I had one egg that fertilized. Huh? Not only does that make no sense, but the information was wrong since both eggs were mature.

Since I was still pretty fired up about this nurse's bedside manner, I emailed my current favorite nurse, Amy, who is on the top of the ball and is compassionate (imagine that), to see if she can offer me any more information (like is this new embryo really worse than Murtle) and I even asked for her to give me the updates from now on since I really don't want to deal with this other nurse.

Ok - I feel better now that I vented. In the meantime, I will continue to try to be hopeful about this cycle!

1 comment:

  1. I'm so sorry about the uncompassionate nurse :( It should be a job requirement when being a nurse at an RE office to remember compassion and that there are people's feelings involved. At least show some human emotion! I really hope your little embie is dividing nicely and you have a perfect embie to transfer tomorrow. All my fingers and toes are crossed for you! Best of luck!!

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