The numbers…

This strange feeling of detachment persisted. We knew what day the donor would be donating because B had to go to the clinic to wank into a cup (it is what it is, so let’s not dress it up as anything else) so her eggs could be fertilised. And while I wanted to know how many eggs they’d got from her, how many had been fertilised, how many had got to day 2, day 5, how many blastocysts, I didn’t have that same desperate-for-the-phone-to-ring anxiety.

Maybe it was that I still felt quite detached from it, but I think a lot of it was also because I feel more sanguine about the whole process. More aware that there’s nothing I can do that will change the outcome so whether I know at 10am that day how many embryos looked healthy, or whether I don’t find that information out until seven hours later makes no odds.

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Little victories…and little disappointments…

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 Continue reading