IVF #2 - Day Three Embryo Report and More

The day following the retrieval we decided to make our way back to Calgary early to give use some time to visit friends and family along the way. Long days of travel followed by evenings of visiting meant I had little time to provide an update. We arrived home last night and Derek's at work today, so I can sit down and write it all out.

After the retrieval, we ended up with seven mature eggs and three immature. We elected to use ICSI on all the mature eggs (we were originally going to do 50/50), and natural IVF on the immature ones to see what happens. The day after retrieval (day one), six of the seven mature eggs fertilized with ICSI had fertilized, and two of the three immature eggs matured overnight and fertilized with natural IVF. On day one we had eight! This was great news and a very good result.

Day two is the first day they can assign grades. VFC grades on a scale of 20, but really it's a scale of 15 - 20. A grade of 20 is perfect and very rare, where a 15 is very poor quality and generally is not transferred. On day two we had two grade 18's, three grade 17's, one 16 and one 15 - seven embryos still going, some better than others. The other piece however is that they were all 'fast cleaving' as most of them were six to seven cells. On day two they look for four cells; you'd think more is better, but growing too fast can lead to them using all their energy too early and petering out later on. It can also indicate chromosomal abnormalities. That said, some recent research has shown that fast cleaving embryos produce more robust blastocysts (day five embryos) if they make it to that stage.

By day three they look for six to nine cell embryos. Our day three embryos were a six cell grade 18, two grade 16+ embryos at five and eight cells, and a nine cell grade 15. We also had two grade 17's with six and seven cells, however they had not done much for about 24 hours so they may have arrested. The lab was going to let them keep going to see what happens.

Today, day four, is a critical day for embryo development and they don't disturb them. They "got a bath" yesterday (words of the lab director!) and went in the incubator, where they will stay until tomorrow. Our hope is that we have two or three blasts tomorrow to do PGD on. The more blasts we have the more likely we have at least one genetically normal embryo.


Keep those little embryos in your thoughts and will them to make it to day five!