Hello lovely ladies,
We're currently undergoing our first cycle with donor eggs. We had a set of 10 eggs, 9 of which thawed and 7 of which fertilised. My scan last week showed that my lining was on the thin side (as always) but over the minimum and bloods showed good progesterone levels, so things were looking good for the first time.
Then, yesterday morning, the day of our day 5 embryo transfer, we had a call from the embryology team to say that only 1 embryo had progressed to a very early blastocyte stage. They would keep the others overnight to see if any could be frozen today. We were a little disappointed / concerned, but happy that we had an embryo to transfer at least.
When we arrived for our transfer in the early afternoon, though, they'd checked our embryos again and found no further development. They gave us 2 options:
a) transfer the lead embryo and a 2nd embryo that was almost at blastocyte stage. They hadn't been able to grade either embryo as they weren't developed enough yet. They assessed the risk of a twin pregnancy from transferring 2 embryos as lower than the risk of no pregnancy from only transferring 1.
b) transfer the lead embryo and leave the 2nd one in culture with the others, in the hope that it would continue to develop and it would be possible to freeze it today. They thought this would give us a lower probability of pregnancy overall.
We went with option a. We'll never know if that was the right one, but we had a phone call this afternoon to say none of the other embryos had developed further and so we don't have any to freeze (disappointing but we know this is very common).
I'm now facing the 2ww and really struggling to stay positive about the chances of a pregnancy coming out of this unexpected double transfer with slow-developing embryo. It feels like the odds are very much against us, which feels particularly unfair when we went with donor eggs to get better odds (none of this is fair on any of us, though).
Does anyone have any success stories to share from unexpected double transfers, or from embryos that developed too slowly to be graded before transfer, please? I'm not looking to get my hopes up high, as realistically I know our chances are low, but just a little hope/positivity would help me get through the next 2 weeks xx