Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Chromosomes

My friend R. is going through IVF. She has been through it before. Her story is that she started TTC the same time I did. She got pg one year into the process and lost the baby at 6 weeks. She and her husband continued to try on their own. After 2 years I started seeing the RE and a year and half later we became pregnant with Macie.
R. and her husband started using the same RE just a year after we did. They did the whole spectrum of testing, and IUI, and injectables and everything. The ended up doing IVF last summer and it worked, they got pg! Then at 8 weeks, at the regular ob they found that the baby had stopped growing. So a D & C for her.
They decided to save their money for another cycle and just test the heck out of the embryo's to see what's been going on. Just last week they retrieved 10 Oocytes and 8 fertilized. Only two embryo's had the right chromosomes.
This has blown my mind. Out of 10 eggs, only 2 were 'right'. I put 'right' in quote because God doesn't make mistakes, but the ones that add up are scarce. Now R. is 38 years old. When her husband asked the Dr. if this was normal, he said it is normal for someone her age.

This scares me.
Does this mean that for all of us who are not doing genetic testing, we really don't know what could happen? I used to think that for every embryo that was growing, there was a chance for a healthy baby. But that is just not the case. How many times did I wonder why it took 5 embryo's for us to achieve one baby? And what about the recent miscarriage? Does that mean that baby wasn't 'right'? Probably.

I just hadn't previously considered that there could be so many genetic questions.
Have any of you done genetic testing? Were your numbers similar to R.'s? Or what are your thoughts?

And even more, how on earth do celebrities (minus Celine Dion) make it look so easy? I'm a huge Tina F.ey fan. And here she is, expecting #2 at age 40. (at least 40). But it's just not that easy.

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