IVF Comic #5: Know It All

🥚The Egg Report🥚

Note: This is #5 in my series, IVF Comics, where I’m making comics to process and share my experience with infertility + IVF.

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Once a day for the next 6 days, we got a call from the Embryologist with what I called 🥚The Egg Report🥚. The reports were not always totally clear, because some of the eggs were maturing and growing at different rates. So we got confusing updates on how many had passed each stage of maturity, fertilization, and cell division.

At one point, I mistakenly thought the Embryologist told me I only had 3 frozen eggs. Which, like any human going through this very weird process, caused me to assume that my eggs were terrible and “low quality” and it was now officially my fault that we had so much trouble getting pregnant. I ran out of time to make a comic about this whole scenario, but just imagine me wallowing on the bed whining to Declan and Declan telling me I’m being silly and we should wait and see what happens.

Once again, Declan was right. (He is right frustratingly often.) The Embryologist called again the next day and said they were able to freeze an additional 11 eggs. The 3 she reported the previous day were just the first 3, not the only 3.

Anyways, I did my best to add up all the numbers from the 6 confusing reports and compile it here in one place:

So here we are! It seems drastic, but as far as averages go, it’s pretty normal. There are additional eggs frozen that were not biopsied but could be biopsied down the line if we decided to (14 were frozen and the 8 highest-rated of those were biopsied for genetic testing). It seems these 4 lil’ eggs have the best chance.

One thing IVF has shown me is how extremely complicated having a baby is, and how many things have to go exactly right for it to work. There are so many places for failure, it’s amazing it can happen at all.

I haven’t gotten to make a comic about some other details yet, like the surgery recovery (which was more difficult than I expected). We’re currently in a waiting stage, while we wait for test results to be sure there’s no additional scarring on my uterus before we move forward to the Egg Transfer. It’s hard to wait, but also kind of nice to have a little pause.

Here’s the song that inspired the title of this week’s comic, Know It All, by Billy Strings. From the song: “Well I thought I knew it all, 'til I crashed into the wall.
Let me learn from my mistakes and try to pick up all the pieces.”

Thanks for reading!

<3,
Christine