Hippocrates In San Diego

Forgotten Sundays. And Wednesdays too, for that matter.

It looks as though I forgot to update this past Sunday. Well, that didn’t last long. Only mildly embarrassing.

To be fair, we do have a lot going on. We closed on the house last week, we have the keys in hand and a mortgage over our heads. The packing is going fairly well so far, we’ve completed two of the harder parts of the house (the two storage areas, full of junk) and should be on schedule for a June 4 move. It’s complicated by the fact that Nicole isn’t supposed to be lifting anything over 10 pounds for the next couple weeks — that’s the other big event going on this week. We had our embryo transfer on Monday.

After a long 5 day wait post-retrieval, we finally had to make the big decision to transfer either one or two embryos. Once we heard the numbers of our Day 5 embryos, the decision came fairly quickly. We had 3 above-average and 1 average quality embryos on Day 5, so we decided to transfer one of the above-average embryos. The risk of twins is really high with transferring two (around 50%), and there’s even a small percentage of triplets that occurs because of blastocyst splitting in utero. Even a remote possibility of triplets was enough to steer us to transferring one solitary embryo. The success rate for one embryo transfers is better than a flip of the coin for someone Nicole’s age, in our specific clinic, which is encouraging. We also had, on Day 5, 6 or 7 morulae, of which 5 became viable blastocysts on Day 6. An additional positive aspect of doing a solitary transfer, then, is that we have 8 embryos now frozen for later attempts (although only 5 of them are above average; 3 were just barely good enough to freeze).

Starting yesterday morning, Nicole was supposed to apply 2 estradiol patches to her skin, and begin changing them every 3-1/2 days. We both failed to look at our calendar today, though, and it wasn’t until I woke up at around 1 AM today that I remembered about the patches. We ended up starting them about 16 hours late. In medicine, as with most things, exact precision is rarely needed. Especially when dealing with the poorly understood and complicated human endocrine system. But it really irks me that we missed starting those patches on time… if you know me, you know that I am the furthest thing from a promptness Nazi. I am flexible and fairly lackadaisical when it comes to being prompt (i.e., lazy). But the fact that a lot is riding on these medications, and that as reasonably intelligent, professional people, we should be able to follow a simple schedule — it pisses me off, frankly. I hate (is there a stronger word than hate? I loathe) the possibility of asking, “What if?” I do not want to be thinking about this 20 years from now, wondering if those 16 hours were somehow critical. The rational part of my brain knows that in all likelihood it won’t make a bit of difference. But the part of me that has been a stressed out freak for the last few weeks isn’t so calm.