Three Little Totsicles

In the end, our clinic only froze three embryos. This is way better than zero and has me thinking about creative names for us to use to refer to them while they're sitting around in a freezer (my favorite by far is Knatte, Fnatte, and Tjatte - the Swedish version of Donald Duck's nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie.) But it also makes me sad.

At our first meeting, when we were discussing the merits of a 3-day versus a 5-day transfer, my RE said something about the best environment for an embryo being, of course, in the womb. The culture mediums that they have in the lab are good, but not as good as what nature provides. So if my embryos were few in number or looked like they needed every advantage in order to make it to term, he would recommend putting them back as soon as possible. Obviously this didn't happen and we went with a day 5 transfer, which meant that eleven of the original fertilized embryos were left in the good-but-not-ideal culture medium for a really long time. I am impressed that three made it, and made it with flying colors and a great quality rating from the lab. But I am really sorry for the eight that didn't. Not all of them were dividing really slowly, which is a sign that they probably wouldn't have survived at all - there were at least two others that reached blast but looked "dark" and not great overall so the embryologist didn't recommend freezing them. I can't help but wonder if maybe we should have chosen one of them to put back in my uterus so that they would have the best chance possible, and leave the freezing to the superstars. Crazy, I know - but these are the kind of thoughts that occupy your time when all you have to do is sit around and think "ooh, was that an implantation cramp or just gas?"

Anyway. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it leads to some pretty sticky issues about a gamete's right to life that I reallyreallyreally don't want to discuss on the Internet. I feel a little bit like Elle Woods arguing that any masturbatory emission where the sperm was not clearly seeking an egg is reckless abandonment. The statistics are that at least one of our frozen embryos will become a living child, and you never know, maybe all of them will. And we did give one of our embryos the best chance we could by transferring it back inside me, so I don't want to lose sight of that.