Rather as I predicted, in my own head at least, little victories are often followed by little disappointments. Three days after the eggs were fertilised, only one was suitable quality for being transferred. It was a good embryo, they told me, eight-cells, grade 1 — they don’t get better than that, they told me. But the others, ah yes, the others — 3-cell, 5-cell and 6-cell with a lot of fragmentation.

I don’t really know what any of that actually means, apart from the fact that it’s generally considered to be not ideal… I’m confused how they end up with odd numbers of cells, I though they divided, I thought they had to be even numbers. So I can’t help suspecting that these 3- and 4-cell jobbies are in fact “duff” as I believe is the totally non-technical term. They’ll keep trying to grow them over the next few days and see if they get to what they call blastocyst stage, which, as I’ve just googled means “an embryo which has developed to the point of having 2 different cell components and a fluid cavity” – if they get to that point, they can be frozen with a view to using in another cycle.

But the bottom line is that from seven eggs, a single good embryo on day three is disappointing. My consultant told me so. She told me that if I were trying to conceive with an older partner, you might be able to blame the sperm, but I can’t, it’s my eggs. She told me that was proof that I’d done the right thing — both in freezing my eggs, and in using them first to get a gauge of what they were like quality wise. But the truth is that despite my decent AMH readings, and not disgraceful follicle count, my eggs don’t appear to be that good.

I have to remind myself that dropout is due to something not being viable. My suspicion is that come day 6 when they call me to tell me what stage the remaining embryos have got to that there won’t be any that have grown enough to be worth freezing — I fear that what they euphemistically call “slow developers” may be “arrested developers.” But while I’m preparing myself, that’s tomorrow’s worry. (Well the day after the day after tomorrow if we’re being pedantic.)

Today I just have to concentrate on willing the one inside me to do what it needs to do to stay there, to burrow its way into my endometrium, to knit itself into the fibre of my being, to be a survivor.