Fertilization Report

The embryologist I spoke to after my retrieval said they would have my fertilization numbers by 8:00am. She promised to call me by 10:00am so that she could reach me before I boarded my flight. By 8:20 I couldn't stand the waiting & worrying so I called the lab. I was immediately transferred to John, the head embryologist. He's such a super nice guy! Here are my numbers:

12 eggs retrieved
9 mature
8 fertilized

The three immature eggs did not mature overnight so they won't be ICSI'd. I'm encouraged by the high fertilization rate. Last cycle it was about 70%, which is below CCRM's 80% average for ICSI. Since I'm using DS from a youngish guy, I was pretty surprised that my fertilization rate was below average. This time the fertilization rate is almost 90%...I hope that's a good sign that these eight eggs are better quality. This is the same number of eggs I had fertilize on D1 last cycle. I can only hope that a few more make it to blast this time to give me a fighting shot at finding a normal embryo. John said they would call on Friday with my D6 report. Whether my biopsies go to New Jersey or stay in-house depends upon which lab can get the results back faster. He said they can pretty much only do one patient per day at CCRM while the NJ lab can do a higher volume. My guess is that two weeks is a conservative estimate so hopefully my actual wait will be a bit shorter than that. At any rate, it should be much shorter than the five week wait I had this spring. I just hope there's one good embryo in this bunch.

Thanks for all of the good thoughts, ladies! The next 120 hours are going to go by very slowly.

Hugs,
T.