Friday, October 1, 2010

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 :)
 Photobucket

5 comments:

Chelle said...

that is interesting. My fingers are crossed for you today.

Carol said...

I hope everything goes well today! I'm dying to know if you did 2 or 3!!

Anonymous said...

I'm praying for you!

Traci said...

michelle-
got your sweet fun package today!!!! have already had some sweets from it!
loved it all, glad that we like the same stuff, how fun is that!!
loving those socks too, love funky sox!!! too funny cause i almost got u some sox as well!!
thanks again and take care!!!

Cheryl B. said...

Praying for good results. Hope all goes well and smoothly. Off to work on scrap room. Hopefully get some organizing done today.

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