The transfer was right on schedule yesterday afternoon. Derek arrived shortly before the appointment and we were ushered into the same room the egg retrieval was performed in. I had a full to bursting bladder for the ultrasound guidance - too full, even, and they asked me to empty about half. Once I was up in the stirrups, the embryologist came into the room to talk to us about our embryos. We had two 'average' day three embryos, one a six cell and one an eight cell, which are exactly where they should be for how old they were. There are a few slow four and five cell embryos still in culture that they'll continued to monitor until day five (tomorrow) to see if we have any that catch up for freezing, but it didn't sound hopeful.
Dr. Scott and the nurse started to work on inserting the external catheter, which was painless - a nice change from the usual pain I experience because of my bent cervix. Apparently the pressure of my full bladder straightened it out. I was seriously shocked when she said she was in, my hand in Derek's ready to squeeze the living hell out of it! I think Derek was somewhat relieved that it went so well.
On the same monitor where I watched them harvest my eggs only a few days prior, they brought up a magnified image of our two little embryos. We watched on the monitor as he sucked them in to the needle, verify they were in there, and then come into the room with the catheter and hand it to the doctor. We were also able to watch on the ultrasound as she injected them - we could see exactly where they were injected. Of course, you can't see the embryos themselves, but there is an air bubble in the catheter between the two embabies that shows up as a white dot on the screen. In less then ten minutes, it was done.
She pulled all of her tools out and covered me up. I lay still for about 10 minutes while Derek and I reflected on the fact that we had two of our own inside me at that very moment. I was moved to a recliner and told to relax for 30 minutes before getting dressed to leave. We sat beside a couple who had gone in before us and wished each other luck as they left.
I spent last night lazing on the couch under direct orders from my husband, who cleaned, cooked and wouldn't let me get up unless it was just to go to the bathroom. We are both in a very positive place and feel like this is going to work for us. We're trying not to talk too much about what will happen if it doesn't, and I sincerely hope we never have to.
One of the best parts of the whole thing was when they handed us a picture of our embryos, which is now hanging up on our fridge with the other family pictures. Here's to hoping that this will be the first page in our baby book:
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| Six cell on the left, eight cell on the right. |
Stick, little embabies!
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