The Day 5 Report That Almost Wasn't

I swear I'm not usually a **tch, but my guess is the staff at the clinic probably stands in a back room somewhere and draws straws to find out which of them is going to be the unlucky one who has to deal with me.

I started getting nervous late this morning when I didn't get the call with our Day 5 report, because we got our Day 1 and Day 3 reports before 10 a.m. Then 11:30 a.m. turned into 1 p.m., which turned into 2 p.m., and finally at about 3:45 p.m. I couldn't stand it anymore, so I called the on-call nurse to find out what was going on with our embryos and whether they had forgotten about them or dropped the whole lot of them on the lab floor or something.

You'd think they would understand that a patient wants their Day 5 report on, well, Day 5. But she informed me all the embryologists had gone home for the day, and if I wanted my Day 5 report, I would have to call back on the morning of Day 6.

Seriously, when has that kind of a response ever gone over well with a still-hormonally-ramped-up infertility patient?

So I threw a hissy fit and informed her that that was a totally unacceptable answer and that someone needed to either a) call me from home with my report or b) get back in their car, drive back to the clinic, look the da** report up on the computer and give me a call.

About 20 minutes later, I finally had numbers: they biopsied and vitrified 6 of the 18 today. That sounded like a woefully low number to me, but the embryologist said a rate of 30% or higher on Day 5 is great. She said they're still growing the other 12, and it looks like 7 to 9 of those might be able to be biopsied tomorrow. She promised me someone would call me tomorrow without me having to make another ticked off/hysterical plea.

I asked how many she thought might wind up being normal, but she said there's just no way to tell, and pointed out that if they could determine which ones were good based on the way they look, there wouldn't be a need for chromosomal testing to begin with. Fair point, but ya can't blame a girl for tryin'.

I also asked about R's sperm. He had 65 million per ml on the day of retrieval. Way to go, R! Numbers like that are still so amazing to us, given that at the beginning of this process nearly 6 years ago, he had 5 to 10 (not million, just 5 to 10) normal in each sample. I think that numer alone made his day.

Tomorrow, I will try to sit and wait for the call patiently. We're going to a Christmas concert matinee with R's family, so I won't be able to post until late again tomorrow.