Triggering Tonight!

Yahoo! We just got the call saying everything looks great and we're triggering tonight for a Tuesday Egg Retrieval (ER)!

So, tonight Brian will give me the trigger shot at exactly 7pm. The trigger will start the final maturation process of the eggs. Brian starts a dose of antibiotics tonight and I start tomorrow night. The ER will be on Tuesday morning at 7am!

So, what's next??? We're moving out of the action part of the cycle. I won't know what to do with no morning monitoring appointments, no shots, no blood draws. After the retrieval, we'll know how many eggs we have. Then, the embryologist will work on fertilizing the eggs with Brian's sperm in a procedure called ICSI (pronounced Ick-see). ICSI is an acronym for intracytoplasmic sperm injection - which is a long, fancy way of saying "inject sperm into the middle of the egg".

ICSI is a very effective method to get fertilization of eggs in the IVF lab after they have been retrieved. IVF with ICSI involves the use of specialized micromanipulation tools and equipment and inverted microscopes that enable embryologists to select and then pick up individual sperms in a tiny specially designed hollow ICSI needle. Then the needle is carefully advanced through the outer shell of the egg and egg membrane and the sperm is then injected into the inner part (cytoplasm) of the egg. This will usually result in normal fertilization in approximately 70-85% of eggs injected with viable sperm. Wow, talk about high tech, huh?!? At first, we had some concerns originally that ICSI went a bit against natural selection, but the embryologist says it’s actually better. If they just put the eggs and sperm in a dish, the egg could be fertilized by the sperm that is CLOSEST to the egg but not necessarily the strongest. In natural conditions, the closest sperm probably would be the strongest because it would have traveled the furthest, etc. With ICSI, they’re mimicking this process to some extent by choosing the strongest, most normally shaped

After that, we will get a call on Wednesday to let us know how many of the embryos fertilized. Then, we will get daily phone updates letting us know how our embies are doing. Please keep the positive thoughts and prayers coming! We still have a long way to go, but we are making positive progress.