Category: Infertility

What’s in a name?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.” — Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

What’s in a name? We like to believe a great deal can be gathered from our name. For centuries people have written histories and tracked origins of names.  Some do it for fun, some for genealogical reasons, and others for history.  So when it came to picking out a name for our little miracle, Dear Husband (DH) and I took this very seriously.  We thought about our past, present, and future and what we hoped to pass along to our child.

However, due to our desire to wait and find out the sex of our little one we had to come up with not just one, but two names.  A boy and a girl. Our decision to “do it the old fashioned way” has been met with some push back.  Most people say things like, “Oh you’re stronger than me I just couldn’t make it without knowing” or “How can you plan a nursery?” Which our nursery, by the way, has been done in grey and white tones with Gingham because we are in the South :).

So, for those that truly know me this is will be no surprise, but we started a name list.  I keep a list for everything; groceries, work (yes, even housework), projects, weekly meals, etc. We had a few that were “good”, but not quite “good enough” as DH would say.  The boy name was easy it only took us two tries, but the girl name was a little bit more difficult.  We started with names we liked, and eventually narrowed it down to 2 or 3 that we could agree to disagree on.

Then one day out of the blue it hit me.  Why not put our grandmother’s names together?  I had always loved my great grandma’s name, and she was what one would call “feisty” (which I admired about her). So I thought let’s see what the meaning behind her name is.  I will have to admit that as soon as I read it tears came to my eyes, and it was not just the pregnancy hormones.  After finding the meaning DH and I knew there was not a more perfect name if we had a girl.

So without prolonging the suspense any further I give you our chosen names:

BOY

William Henry — William (DH’s first name) and Henry (we both just liked jit). The English meaning of William is Resolute protector and Henry means Rules the Home 🙂

GIRL

Mamie Jane — Mamie (my great grandmother’s name) is a Hebrew version of Mary meaning Wished-for child and Jane (DH’s grandmother’s name) in Hebrew means Gift from God.  (Like I said river of tears at this point.)

 

So for anyone that has been following our journey to this point I think you can tell from our names that we are beyond grateful for this blessing.  Our Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE or IVF doctor as some would say) gave us 26 to 28 weeks as being the point I could carry a pregnancy too.  Well as of Thursday we are officially 39 weeks! So each day that this sweet little miracle stays put is a blessing from God.  We are so ready to meet our miracle, but we are OK if they decide to stay put just a little longer.

 

I just haven’t met you yet!

I might have to wait, I’ll never give up. I guess it’s half timing, and the other half’s luck. Wherever you are, whenever it’s right. You’ll come out of nowhere and into my life. And I know that we can be so amazing, and baby your love is gonna change me. And now I can see every possibility. – Michael Bublé

Hi y’all! I felt it was time for an update now that we have more information.  We received a call from the embryologist and our RE (Reproductive Endocrinologist), and they were both REALLY excited about our final count.  We ended up with enough embryos to try more than once.  God has blessed us beyond measure with our embryos.  We were given grades on our embryos from A to B- which is awesome news! Embryos are are given a “grade” just like if you are in school beginning on Day 3 after retrieval. The below chart is taken from ARC Fertility if you are interested in researching infertility and the IVF process more. The below list is the grading chart for embryos:

Embryo Grade Description
Grade 1 Cells are of equal size; no fragmentation seen
Grade 2 Cells are of equal size; minor fragmentation only
Grade 2.5 Cells are mostly of equal size; moderate fragmentation
Grade 3 Cells are of unequal size; no fragmentation to moderate fragmentation
Grade 4 Cells are of equal or unequal size; fragmentation is moderate to heavy

So from the above chart our embryos range from the 1-2.5 grades which is exactly where you want to be.  Our doctor called with some encouraging words yesterday, and after holding it all together for the last two weeks I let it go.  I cried my happy, alligator tears this morning from the overflow of emotions.  Although, we are extremely excited about our embryos our infertility battle is far from over.  This is honestly the first step in our journey.

Next, we will talk to our doctor about scheduling our first transfer.  From here we will have more monitoring appointments of labs and ultrasounds.  With this information we will talk about the number of embryos to transfer, our probability of success, and get a date on the books for a transfer! So there are some exciting days ahead for the Fielder crew, and we just ask you to keep us in your prayers as we make our decisions going forward. Thank you again for all the prayers and support and hopefully we’ll be updating again very soon!

 

 

It’s the final countdown

Hi y’all! We are back to give you an update on our fertilization process.  We have talked with our embryologist in Memphis several times, and we have a final count from the oocyte (follicle/egg) retrieval. However, our future little princes/princesses are still in incubation so we will not have a final count for freezing until next week.  So with this post we wanted to go into the process of fertilizing, incubating, counting, and freezing.  If you are like us you had no clue this stage could be so interesting.  Usually, this is the stage that would happen before you get that BFP (big fat positive) on a pregnancy test.  So to actually get to see pictures of your cells splitting and forming your future child(ren) we think is rather cool, and it kind of puts us IVF peeps in a really unique category.

embryo-development

So the above picture is NOT one of our embryos.  We have not gotten our official first family photo yet (it’s OK to laugh at this because I am 100% putting it in a scrapbook some day) :). I snagged this photo from another blog post  (credit to Sara Ratliff). We are going to try our best to explain what is happening in the above chart, and then we will FINALLY give you a count.

Day 0 – Is retrieval day where the oocytes are removed and then fertilized

Day 1 – The egg is now fertilized and called a zygote

Days 2 – 5 The zygotes remain in a petri-dish in the incubator. From here they will be taken out of the incubator as a blastocyst (day 5). They will be graded on a scale of good, average, or poor and then the best options (zygotes that become blastocysts) will be frozen to await transfer.  This is also the stage before freezing where you can find out gender with a PGS (Pre-implantation Genetic Screening), and it also can check for chromosomal abnormalities.  We have decided to forego this option, but it is quite amazing what science can do.

So now the whole reason you have read this far our retrieval numbers are (drumroll):

18 oocytes (follicles) were retrieved

15 were mature

14 fertilized

We will get a “final” number that will be viable blastocysts for freezing in the next couple of days, but Drew and I have decided to keep that information to ourselves. Originally, our doctor had hoped for 25-30 oocytes, but we are thrilled with what we were able to retrieve. Obviously we would love as many as possible, but we are happy with knowing we have at least one opportunity.

This process is far from over, but for now we will continue to rest up and get me ready for transfer.  Thank you again for all of the love, support, and prayers.  We have been truly blessed from all the calls, texts, comments, and good vibes.