IVF + Egg Retrieval Update
It’s been a little over a year since our first IUI and the start of our fertility treatment journey.
Where the heck has time gone?
So much has happened over the last year:
we went through 3 failed IUI’s
had a chemical pregnancy
moved homes + started renovations on our new home
completed my first IVF egg retrieval
celebrated turning 33 years old
If you’re tired reading those high-level points just imagine how tired we are 😂
Okay, but in all seriousness, let me bring you up to speed on our first and latest IVF retrieval!
Egg Retrieval Essentials
Going into IVF and this egg retrieval, I was prepared for the worst. IUI was SO hard on me emotionally last year, I was prepared for IVF to be ten times worse. To my surprise, I only had two days were I felt emotionally “out of control” and completely on edge.
For reference, when I did IUI I had entire weeks where I felt like this.
In total I did STIMs (the shots) for 10 days, and my retrieval was on day 12.
The biggest side effect I experienced from STIMs was anxiety, which I found out later is a very common side effect of Menopur. My anxiety was THROUGH THE ROOF about every little thing…. the amount I was googling and asking ChatGPT was absolutely insane.
Overall, the shots were not as bad as I anticipated, and I had a decent level of energy throughout it all, which I am SO thankful for!
The morning of the egg retrieval I was a bundle of nerves, so much so that I started bawling my eyes out as the sweet nurse talked me through how everything was going to go. Everything in STIMs leads up to this moment, and honestly, my emotions completely took over. I could no longer “hold it together” and was terffified to go under anesthesia.
After a 10-minute procedure, I spent the next 30 minutes of “awake” time telling Aaron how I had gone fishing during my dream and asking the poor nurses multiple times how they moved me from one bed to another when I was asleep.
That day, we found out that 14 eggs had been retrieved, and I truly didn’t know how to feel… I was seeing all over tiktok girls getting 20-30 eggs and I just felt like “should have gotten more” to help our chances. The nurses reassured me that 14 was great and we were on our way back home.
The day of the retrieval and the following day were the ones where I experienced the most amount of day. Day one, I could hardly move, Aaron had to help me in and out of the car + our bed. Day two I was able to walk around, but my entire abdomen felt tender and day three, I started to feel like myself again.
Our retrieval numbers so far:
14 eggs retrieved
11 eggs matured
11 eggs fertilized
4 embryos
When they called us to give us our embryo number, my heart sank… Going from 11 fertilized eggs to 4 embryos felt like such a BIG drop.
Here’s a look at how our embryos were graded:
2 day 5 - AA
1 day 6 - BA
1 day 7 - BB
Blast Quality
1. 2 Day 5 – AA
→ Top-tier embryos — excellent development speed and structure. These are the kinds clinics love to transfer first.
2. 1 Day 6 – BA
→ Still very high quality; a slightly slower grower, but very viable.
3. 1 Day 7 – BB
→ Day 7 blasts are later bloomers, but BB is a solid grade. More and more clinics report healthy pregnancies from Day 7s — especially BB or better.
Even with the grading above there is no guarantee which embryos will be genetically normal and good to transfer. So now we wait at least two weeks to see what PGT-A testing has to say about our embryos and pray for the best.
IVF is just as much a mental game as it is physical.
Each day, you’re praying for the best and preparing yourself for the worst.
My prayer is that we end up with the perfect amount of embryos to start our family and that this time next year, we are sitting in a completely different place than we are today.
If you feel inclined over the next couple of weeks to say a prayer for our embryos and that testing comes back normal, it would mean more than you know.