Monday, June 25, 2007

Retrieval & Collection Recap And Transfer Day


Okay, it's been three days since the retrieval and the chosen embryos were transferred back in today. I never wrote further about the retrieval, so I'll start with that.

Retrieval.

Wow. It was only three days ago, but it seems like forever. Let's see what I remember.

We went in Friday morning. From what we had heard of other people's experiences we were expecting they would send me to collect my sperm sample while they were prepping my wife for the retrieval. As it turns out, they had me wait and didn't send me off until after she was done. I snapped the pic and wrote the previous blogget while I was waiting. When she came back after about an hour the doctor told us they had gotten nine good eggs out of twenty. The others were mostly not yet mature, but several had been fragile and had ruptured before or during the retrieval. (We think now they were most likely from the earliest appearing follicles and were just a bit "overripe".)

Well, my wife was still out of it from the anesthesia and her mind latched onto the part about some being fragile and wouldn't let go of it. I and the nurses had to tell her several several times that there were nine good ones - one nurse even wrote it on her hand - until she had recovered enough from the anesthesia to focus and remember it. She cried a lot during that time, of course, and the nurse also explained that that was common - pumped full of hormones, perceptions made strange by the anesthesia, the release of finally getting the eggs out all adds up. Finally, she calmed down and said she was okay and happy that we had gotten nine good ones.

Collection.

Then the sent me down the hall to do my "collection". The room they sent me to was a corner room, with big nearly floor-to-ceiling windows in both the "lounge" section and the bathroom section. Fortunately there were blinds, which I adjusted to block the view from the parking lot below. I could still see the bright blue sky. I could also see the various nude and semi-nude women in the art hanging on the bathroom wall. Maybe I'll post a pic later.

I had been given a scrub kit to wash up with. Based on my experience at the backup collection I stripped down completely to better facilitate the washing. (Rinse water tends to run down the legs, so no shoes or socks. Shirts will hang down and brush against the clean junk so off that comes too.) I also took off my ring for good measure. The nurse had made a point of impressing upon me the importance of thoroughly rinsing - the antibiotic soap (with betadine in it, I think) kills sperm, so gotta get it all off - so I did. The floor got a little wet, so I laid the first sterile towel on the floor after I had finished with it.

The cleaning finished, I moved into the lounge to get down to business. My wife had been joking in the days before that she was going to call out to me as I headed off for the collection: "Skip the Penthouse and go right to the Hustler!" If you recall from my earlier entry we had found that while Penthouse has lots of "socially redeeming" articles, many of them include photos not exactly conducive to the task at hand. Hustler, on the other hand, as very little such extraneous filler. Well, lo and behold, there are a few copies of Penthouse, but no Hustler. I decided to make the best of things and started thumbing through a Penthouse. Some of the girls are nice, but a bit too glamorous for my taste. Seems Penthouse has abandoned the peeing I heard they had begun to feature a few years back to return to a more Playboy-esque style. After looking through a couple I decided to take a look at the copies of the other title in the rack: Black Tail. Good move. While it didn't have the full couples sex spreads of Hustler, it did have much more explicit material than penthouse, and the black women gave it what was for me an exotic touch. I found a couple nice, uh... friendly looking girls without any tattoos showing and completed my task.

I dropped off the sample at the lab and off we went. My wife got a ride down in a wheelchair and I picked her up at the curb.

The next day the doctor called to tell us we had five fertilize, and we'd know after three days how many we'd have to put back. In the subsequent days we worried about having none to transfer, and fantasized about having them all grow well and maybe even have one or two split into possible twins. (Would we put back in both embryos from a twin pair, or go for a more diverse group to hedge against genetic problems?) In the end we decided to go in with the expectation that since they hadn't called to tell us not to bother coming in there must be at least one to transfer, but that at our age we wouldn't expect more than maybe two.

Transfer Day!

That brings us to today - Transfer Day. We worked this morning, shorthanded but catching up on lost days as well as we can, and closed early to head for the clinic. The nurse had called us to tell us that there had been a schedule change and we were to be there a half hour sooner than we had been scheduled. We had planned on closing up at 1:00, so we ate early and headed out soon after.

We got there on time, with my wife's bladder full to bursting. They had asked that it be full to reduce the angle of the uterus and make positioning the transfer catheter easier. Well, she just couldn't hold it and she had a bottle of water handy, so she went a little in the lobby restroom and started drinking while we waited in our room. The doctor was in surgery elsewhere, as it turns out, and ended up being late. In fact he was late for our original time. My wife ended up going again and drinking some more before he arrived, with the nurse's blessing. She filled up again just in time.

The doctor came in with something for us - a picture of the embryos that would be transferred. There were three, all graded average (3) or above. (5 is perfect.) We smiled ear to ear and marveled at the picture. That's it above, with the patient info removed of course.

She was prepped and the bed raised into position. While the nurse operated the ultrasound to guide the catheter positioning, I held my wife's hand. In hindsight I should have taken off my ring then too. Apparently, they had difficulty getting a satisfactory visualization of the catheter's position. First the nurse tried. Then the doctor draped a sterile drape over the ultrasound paddle and tried himself. Then they swapped on the vaginal probe and poked at her abdomen with that. Finally they used it via her vagina - right in there with the speculum and the catheter. It was during all that that my wife crushed my fingers against my ring. I didn't complain. I just took the opportunity, once it came my way, to adjust my ring a bit to a more comfortable position and let her squeeze as much as she needed. I wish she could have made some adjustments for her comfort too.

After the embryologist checked the catheter and declared that all the embryos had been transferred they removed the equipment and helped my wife into a more comfortable position. After a mandatory half-hour rest, and a talk with the embryologist about my sperm count (up a good deal again, but still low motility) we headed home, with a brief stop at Secret Headquarters to pick up a couple things we had left behind in our hasty departure. My wife spent the rest of the evening in the recliner watching an Office DVD and being waited on (and yelling to me where things were that she wanted.) She'll be taking it easy for a while - only light exercise and keeping cool.

Next stop: the pregnancy test in a week and a half or so.

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