Floating.... with all fingers crossed!

Day 3 results are in and we are still on cloud 9  :)

Our embryologist grades embryos as Good Fair or Poor (nice n easy). We've got 5 'good' quality and 2 'poor' quality embryos :D. The embryo grading system is severely inaccurate in determining survivability so that makes me a little nervous....  it all goes off the appearance of the embie and we all know that looks aren't always everything!  I'm kicking myself because I forgot to ask how many cells they are... though it really doesn't matter I guess.  She decided it would be best to culture them to Day 5 and freeze on Sunday. I'm o.k. with this because she said they typically grow out to day 5 with good resuIts and I know blasts have a better chance at implantation. I think stats say 50% of embies will make it to blast, right? IF we can make it to Sunday she said over 90% will survive the vitrification/warming process. I'm feeling pretty good that we'll have something to freeze & transfer in a few weeks. Though I'm still crossing my fingers and toes and won't pop the champagne til Sunday.....

I'm feeling MUCH better today! My headache is gone. My belly is still tender in the ute/ovary area but I'm not nearly as uncomfortable and bloated. I visited my acupuncturist who gave me some 'cleansing' needles. I also went shopping. Got a super cute dress and some pants a size bigger lol.

We will get the final verdict tomorrow morning and know how many made it to blastocyst and what's going in the deep freeze.  I'm still super scared but very excited.... this time the odds are with us. Ah! 

A lot of people have asked me why Dr Rockstar has made this protocol into a 2 part/freeze all / embryo banking cycle.  I can't remember if I've posted about it yet... 

It's for many reasons. 1) they've found better success when the body is given a chance to recover from controlled  hyperstimulation, let estrogen levels return to normal, and be able to focus just on lining. High estrogen is bad bad bad for implantation.  2)Back in the day when the embryo freezing process sucked, it was better to do fresh transfers. Now that technology caught up and the process has gotten perfected with vitrification etc, frozen transfers do much better.  It has the same success if not better than fresh transfer.  3) with the drug protocol I used, 100mg clomid was one of the stims. Of course we know clomid sucks the life out of the ute lining.

There are some schools of thought that believe only the best of the best embryos will survive to blastocyst and survive vitrification & warming. We run the risk of nothing survive and having NO transfer, but at the same time if we DO transfer, we know those are some tough, bada$$ embies.

Is all this the "right" approach to ivf? Who knows. But I trust my RE implicitly and know he is a very smart cookie with lots of other smart cookies around him... all I hope is that it works!!!