Noah woke up and said, “November can suck a dick.” Then Dr. N called.
“Well, I have good news and bad news,” he began. We couldn’t write a more dramatic screenplay if we tried.
The bad news was that the fragmented embryo had died, or stopped dividing, or arrested—there are so many terms to keep straight. The good news was that one of the other two fertilized eggs that were dormant yesterday started splitting and was now six cells at day three. Huh? There were a thousand questions I had but Dr. N stopped me by saying he couldn’t really answer most of them. We don’t know why. We don’t know what it means exactly. Could there be something wrong with it? Very possible. Could it go on to be a viable pregnancy and health baby? Perhaps. He gave us three choices:
The first was to genetically test it to see if there was indeed a problem with it. It was an expensive procedure (around $5,000) and may not be worth it for one single embryo. The second option was to do the transfer today, get it back into nature’s incubator and see if my body could sustain it. The risk of that would be not knowing if it was strong enough, not knowing if it started to fragment and do weird things which most likely wouldn’t take, but I’d have to wait two weeks before I’d know. The third option was to wait until Monday to see if it makes it to the blastocyst phase, which is when it splits so much that the embryo itself looks kind of like an unused condom. If it makes it to that phase we will have more information about it. Only a small percentage of embryos make it to this stage, so there is a risk of letting it stay in the dish. But the ones that do are more likely to produce a pregnancy. He told us to discuss it and he’d call back in 20 minutes.
How do we make this decision? How do we make any decision? Dr. N said he would wait until Monday because he felt seeing it until then is better, but he would understand if I wanted to just get it in me and test for genetic problems later if it took. He said if I was “comfortable with uncertainty” I may want to do this. Noah agreed with the doctor, 100%. He wanted to let it sit and not rush to put something into my body, another procedure, if it turned out to not be good.
Comfortable with uncertainty I definitely am not. I’m slowly learning to tolerate it because I have no choice. Life and creating life is uncertain. But I had this gut feeling that we should just get it in my body. My body would love it and all would be OK. Maybe our baby was just a little slow to start, kind of like his/her dad. Or again, stubborn and non-conformist like his/her mama. But thinking that maybe it was in fact a him/her scared me enough to put my desperation aside and vote with my husband. We will wait until Monday. The chances are slim, but there is still a chance, another string of hope, dental floss thin. Maybe this was our little fighter, maybe it was just another few blows to the face before the final knockout.
I was mad at myself for feeling optimistic. For seeing how from a story aspect this is actually really intense and obviously has to end up in a beautiful baby, or even better it could split and become identical twins, and even more ironic for Noah, twin girls, like the two stars of his reality show that drive him absolutely insane! How do I stop my brain from coming up with a thousand different scenarios? How do I convince myself there is value to the lesson I am learning in extreme patience and acceptance of the unknown? It’s like exposure treatment for anxiety—I’m being exposed to the most exhausting, emotional mindfuck and if I don’t have an aneurysm and die then I live to see another day. Bad news or rapidly changing situations will no longer startle my psyche to its core. Que sera sera. I try to just tell myself that today we have a six-cell embryo. We hope it is bigger and better tomorrow, but it may not be, and we’ll deal with it, but I don’t believe myself. I am wishing and hoping and praying and planning and totally obsessed. The only thing to do is distraction. Movies, food, exercise.
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Posted by: tellisa | June 19, 2017 at 01:15 AM