Babies dancing in my head!

Good news from the lab today. Yesterday at egg retrieval they got 17 eggs!! That's quite a few more than they expected. Thank you donor. We will be forever grateful.

At this point, the doctors would have normally just mixed the sperm with the eggs and let nature take its course. But that's not what happened. Since last time we had a problem called "polyspermia", the doctors elected to do ICSI. So let me explain. Last time, the eggs that we did get, many of them ended up fertilizing with more than one sperm per egg. That's not normal. It was probably a problem with my eggs, but they couldn't be sure there wasn't a component of sperm problems too. And right now is not the time to test the waters. So they decided to do ICSI, which is "intracytoplasmic sperm injection". This is where they suck up a single sperm with a tiny glass needle, then break a hole in the lining around the egg with a laser and insert the sperm inside. This way they can ensure that each egg only has one sperm inside.

I don't altogether love the idea of ICSI. It takes some of the natural selection out of the process. Usually the strongest sperm would win out (or so the theory goes). But when the scientists look under the microscope they can only see some aspects of the sperm. As a result of this, some (but not all) studies have shown that when you do ICSI the resulting children have a higher incidence of genetic defects and birth defects compared to IVF without ICSI. The absolute incidence is still quite low, but it's about twice as likely relative to non-ICSI children. This worries me of course. But in the end, regardless of how a child is conceived, there is no guarantee of perfection.

OK, now that you understand ICSI, I can finish the story. So they got 17 eggs. The eggs get a few hours to finish maturing. By the time they went to do ICSI, 15 eggs had matured. Those each got a sperm injection. Then they wait 24 hours to see which eggs will fertilize. What they are looking for is for the DNA portion of the egg to replicate into two. This means they are preparing to grow. SOOO.....this morning, 11 eggs had fertilized!! Now, this does not equal 11 children. (too bad, cause we could have our own baseball team.) Not all 11 will keep growing normally, but we hope that most of them will. We'll get an update on that this Thursday. The plan from there would be transfer of the best looking embryo on Saturday, and freezing of the others. Hopefully there would be enough frozen embryos to allow us to complete our family over time.

I hope you can feel the excitement through the electronic distance. We're thrilled here. There's certainly more to go before all is said and done.