More IVF news
The Lister Hospital called W again this morning to report on progress with the fertilized eggs. All 8 are continuing to develop, with some going faster than others - although they are still reporting all of them as being in “Grade 1” condition.
The plan from here on is to wait another couple of days for the best candidate eggs to reach a stage called the “Blastocyst”. I never knew about any of this until yesterday, so the mechanics of what is going on seem incredible.
Here’s a potted explanation… as soon as the egg gets fertilized, it starts splitting - so it becomes two cells, then four, then eight and so on. You would think it would just grow into a huge lump, wouldn’t you - but it doesn’t. As soon as there are somewhere near 64 cells, they form into a ball shape, with the edge thicker on one side than the other… that thicker part (after several hundred billion divisions) becomes the baby, and the rest becomes the placenta. The ball is termed a “Blastocyst”. How the cells have all the programming to do this off their own back is amazing to me.
Our eggs are at about the 4 to 8 cell stage at the moment - over the weekend they will divide a few more times and reach the Blastocyst stage, at which point the most advanced will be picked for transfer back into W - the rest will be frozen for future attempts should anything go wrong.
The next few weeks are going to be absolute torture.