As described below, the stimulation phase of our IVF cycle came to an end on Monday night, when Sarah got a nice big shot of hCG. Now, the next step is to get the mature eggs out of her ovaries into the Petri dishes where they will be fertilized. The process of getting the eggs is called "egg retrieval" and it happens bright and early tomorrow morning.
The procedure is relatively simple; the doctor uses an ultrasound machine to guide a long needle to Sarah's ovaries, then punches it into each ovarian follicle. Once he's "stuck" a follicle, he sucks out the entire contents of the follicle, which should include a mature secondary oocyte (egg). Hopefully, due to the stimulation process, there will be a large number of these mature eggs: say, a dozen or more. (In 2006 they recovered 14 eggs.)
Sarah is under general anesthesia for the whole process, which is conducted in an outpatient surgery center and takes less than an hour. We'll leave home at 5:30; I expect we'll be back around lunch. There is no recovery to speak of, though it does take a while to fully shake off the effects of the anesthesia; I expect her to be sleepy all day Wednesday but fully back to normal on Thursday.
Meanwhile, tomorrow is also the day I make my genetic contribution. I do this while Sarah's in recovery. Once they have my fluid, it works like this: an embryologist put a drop of it in a Petri dish filled with a nutrient-rich growth medium. Then an egg is added to the drop, and the dish is covered and put in an incubator.
24 hours later, the embryologist check in and sees how many of the eggs successfully fertilized. As a rule, it will not be all of them; in 2006 11 of the 14 recovered eggs were fertilized. We'll get a phone call from the embryologist Thursday afternoon; at that time she'll tell us how many zygotes we've conceived.
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