IVF - follicles & eggs

Today will {{hopefully}} be my first day of pregnancy :) I will be away from the computer so I thought I'd share something with you guys that I found out with regard to IVF and my egg retrieval. You might remember from this post that just 2 days before my egg retrieval I had about 11 eggs growing (or so I thought).


When my doctor went in and did my egg retrieval there were only 5.


So what happened to the rest of them??


Here's the thing - eggs are microscopic. What my doctor was seeing on ultrasound was the 'follicles' that surround an egg. There's no way of knowing if there's a mature egg inside until they do the egg retrieval. 

So after egg retrieval, my doctor washes off the follicles & extracts the fluid (basically). Then the embryologist looks at them under the microscope to determine how many actual eggs are in there.


So if there were eggs inside the other follicles that we saw on ultrasound, they just didn't get enough food to make the egg grow.


Interesting huh?! I thought so...so I thought I'd share :)