Our little grey circles!

The transfer happened this past weekend!! Yay!! I'm sure some of you are thinking "Yay! What the heck is she talking about?!" Haha. As a reminder... The short story of IVF goes like this. 

Step 1- Take a bunch of drugs to make my ovaries over produce. 
Step 2- Collect the eggs via surgery. 
Step 3- Fancy (and expensive!) doctors take Justin's sperm and inject it into the eggs in a little petri dish. 
Step 4- We wait patiently while they grow. 

The next step happened this weekend! They take the now fertilized eggs and put them back into my womb to hopefully implant and grow!! This is also the "moment of conception" for us. A woman will likely have lots of eggs fertilize in her lifetime but she doesn't get pregnant if they don't implant. So this is it! The funny thing about it is that Justin wasn't there. :( He had an appointment at work that couldn't be changed so for the rest of our lives we will be able to joke that Justin wasn't there when our children were conceived. haha. We decided to wait till the kids are MUCH older to tell them that though. haha.

I assumed this would be a much easier process than it was. I read that they just stick a catheter in you and drop in the eggs and it's done! That is true, but first they washed out my insides with sponges and such and it was really uncomfortable! Not a whole lot worse than some of the other procedures, but my brain wasn't really ready for it. haha. And the fact that Justin wasn't there for me i'm sure made it even worse. I didn't have anyone's hand to hold! If I had known, I probably would have had my mom or sister come with me, but alas, I didn't. Oh well! It's over now. 

Anyway, at the retrieval, they collected 14 eggs!! That's really good. Actually what they're aiming for is between 14 and 15 eggs. So by definition, it was perfect. haha. However, only 11 of those eggs were mature enough to fertilize. And of those 11, 9 really started growing. They called me a couple days after the retrieval to let me know all of these things. I assumed that meant that we'd have 2 to put in me, and 7 to freeze for later. I was WRONG! Only 3 made it to the end! I will try to not bore you with too many details of how it works, but I want to tell you a little. So... this is what eggs look like!

This is a progression from day 0 all the way to day 7 of maturation of a fertilized egg. (While doing some research to help me explain this a little better, I found some conflicting opinions on when the best time is to transfer the eggs. I'll give you the opinion of my doc and the reason behind what he did, but know that if you care to, there's lots of info out there. )

I'm pretty sure there were a few more eggs that lasted to day 3 than to day 5. They could have put the eggs in then and in fact I had a tentative appointment set for that day. However, when it got to that time, the doc decided they could last a little longer so we rescheduled for day 5. The real simple story about why is that most eggs grow just fine to day 3 but they have little way to know whether or not the egg will actually implant. When you transfer day 3 eggs, they will often do 3 or even 4 to give you a better chance. However, naturally in your body, the egg is ideally fertilized in the Fallopian tube and then take a few days to travel to the uteran lining to implant. The goal of waiting a little longer is so that they'll be more ready to implant. 

So sorry for the science lesson. but it makes me excited for my little grey circles!

Aren't they cute?! haha. Those are the best little eggs that Justin and I got and they look perfect! Just like the above picture on day 5. The doc said they were perfect and gave them a 70% chance of implanting!!! That's way high!! I was excited! (as if you couldn't tell by the absurd number of  exclamation marks. haha)

So into the procedure room I go. There was a TV on the wall where I could watch the procedure. but first I had to identify that this was in fact my name! haha. Yup! That's me!

The next pic of of my little eggs! 

This next one is all zoomed out. If you look close, you can see the two little eggs in the middle. :)

This is the catheter that sucked the little eggs up and eventually went into me!

The doc used an abdominal ultrasound to guide the catheter in. If you look closely, the top bubble is my half full bladder and under that is my womb! haha.  

This is the doc in the room next to us that was checking everything and making sure the eggs were all good! He's an embryologist. :)

So there ya go! That day I went home and had to take it really easy. Not as far as laying down all day but just shy of it. Luckily it was General Conference so I had lots of laying around to do anyway! Since then I've had a few restrictions but not too many. I can't lift anything over 50 pounds or do anything with much impact at all. So no running or hiking or any sports. The 50 lbs thing isn't such a big deal. haha. I'm not moving or helping anyone move. But the impact thing is a little harder! Like today Justin wanted to go play "soccer golf" but I'm not allowed to run, so I can't go! Sad day.  But I'm allowed and encouraged to walk or swim or do Yoga. So if anyone wants to join me, let me know! 

I'm now supposed to wait 12 days to go in for a blood pregnancy test. That would be the 16th for us. But I'm going to be out of town! Dang it! haha. We had this trip planned for a long time, so I'm just going to have to wait a little longer. So we'll find out the 20th if they took! I'm usually the girl that says to not tell people about your pregnancy till way later to avoid having to tell people about a miscarriage if that should happen. And I guess that's possible. But with this blog, I feel like if that happens, I'll have a big group of people supporting me. So I'll tell you Almost as soon as I know. haha. Till then, pray for our little grey circles to become little babies!!

Fingers crossed!!!