Fertilization

I talked to our clinical coordinator today about the whole process of IVF. It was really starting to scare me. Both R and I felt as if there were too many unknowns about the process and we wanted some answers. She answered a few questions that I had, and we set up a time for both R and I to talk to her.

Since we told her about our belief of "life at conception" and that we did not want embryos discarded, she gave us a few options: freezing embryos, freezing oocytes, and limited fertilization. Not all embryos make it to blastocysts. The 8-12 celled blastocysts are what will be implanted. Just because we fertilize 10 eggs, does not mean that those 10 eggs will "take" the fertilization and become embryos and then divide into blastocysts. I feel like this whole "fert" thing is like playing Risk.

Freezing embryos - freezing the number of embryos (over the 2-3 we will implant) and saving them for later use. There could be 20+ embryos that need freezing and would require future IVF procedures.

Freezing oocytes - freezing the left over eggs they did not fertilize. Seems random to me.

Limited Fert - fertilizing only as many eggs as we will implant. Or fertilizing a specific number of eggs with the idea of freezing what goes above and beyond the maximum of 3 SIRM will implant.