Day 6 Was Less Exciting

The lab was hoping 7 to 9 more would make it, but we wound up with 4, so we have a total of 10.

That's a good number, I know, but ultimately it doesn't mean anything until we get the CGH results back and find out if we have any normal ones to transfer.

And speaking of transfer, I got a phone call from RE's nurse today. In an e-mail I had sent her last week, I mentioned being afraid to transfer them back to me and that we might at some point decide to go the gestational surrogate route instead. So she called to let me know that there are additional FDA rules requiring more bloodwork for R and me for GS, and she didn't know if we would be able to meet those rules at this late date.

It turns out we are, but only because R left work unexpectedly for an heroic and frantic sprint to two different labs so that his blood could be drawn before they closed this afternoon. All of that panic was because it turns out the male partner has to be tested for communicable diseases within 7 days of egg retrieval, and today was the 7th day. (Two labs were because the blood could only be drawn here, then has to be shipped to the clinic for testing, and the first lab he went to - the one closest to his office - does not do blood draws if they are not also going to be running the test.)

I also have to do the tests, but for some reason the FDA grants the female partner 30 days instead of just 7.

Maybe I'm just in a mood to be extremely irritated by every little thing, but it really ticks me off that no one at the clinic mentioned it to us before now. It would have been so much simpler to have the blood drawn while we were there the day of my retrieval. I'm particularly nervous about it having to be shipped, because I had to do that for the one-day workup, and the lab that drew it (the same one R wound up at today) stuck it in the back of a freezer, where it sat for a week while they insisted that they had mailed it and that the receiving lab had lost it. That little escapade took four hours of my life over the course of three days before I could finally get someone to locate it in their freezer and actually put it in the mail to be shipped.

So I'm not looking forward to having to keep track of shipping again, particularly because if they lose these vials, it's not just a matter of re-drawing it; it would mean we couldn't use the embryos from this cycle for GS at all.

And it's so totally ridiculous that we have to go through all this hoopla in the first place. If we had never done IVF before and had never had any miscarriages, I could see why no one at the clinic would bring up additional testing for the possibility of GS.

But the two VERY. FIRST. THINGS. out of REs mouth during our initial phone consult this spring were 1) donor egg and 2) gestational surrogate. So it's not like the subject hadn't come up. And with 6 miscarriages, it's something they could have at least said "ya might want to consider this, just to cover all your bases."

I know that ultimately, we cycled where we did for the lab. Although honestly, we had 10 blasts that were frozen during our first IVF too, so right now to me everything feels exactly the same, and I don't know that we're getting a whole bunch of benefit from the revered lab.

Next up: Six to eight weeks of waiting for the CGH results, and tackling the thyroid issue, beginning with another appointment with Regular Endo tomorrow.