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Due to my wife's religious beliefs, we will not consider discarding / freezing / donating embrios. That means that whatever eggs we fertilize, we transfer. That means we fertilize max 2 eggs.
Egg freezing could be a good option for us, but it's a new technology, in experimental phase here in Australia.
Has anyone gone through this with good/bad results? Love to hear about it.
thanks
Hi Aramis7, I can't tell you about freezing because I have never had any to freeze. I had 4 eggs on first ivf cycle and ended up with only 1 egg to put back so nothing to freeze, on my second cycle they retrieved 13 eggs, 9 fertilised, on day of transfer only 2 were ready to put back and the rest were unsuitable for freezing so I didn't have any to freeze that time either. I think it depends on what type of transfer you are doing, I had a 5 day transfer and it is harder to get eggs to freeze, however I have heard that it is easier to freeze at 2 or 3 days which is where i am going this time.
I was told that up to 75% of eggs fertilise, from there only 75% will make day 3 and from there up to 75% will make it to blast stage. Once at blast only a very small percentage are suitable for freezing.
I don't know if that helps but everything I know I find out from research on the net or asking my embryologist.
Hope all goes well for you
Tracey, I think Aramis means freezing unfertilized eggs, not embryos?
Aramis, I remember reading somewhere here on BB about egg freezing but can't remember where. Maybe have a search around the LT AC thread?
Hope someone can help you!
Thanks Willow, yes I was referring to freezing eggs instead of embryos. I'll do a search around the forum.:
Thanks to both of you for your answers.
cheers
Aramis,
My DH and I have the same issue - we do not want any embryos frozen or destroyed or anything like that - we want them all transfered, even if they are of poor quality, because of our beliefs.
We have been told we will never conceive without IVF. We asked about egg freezing and it seems most clinics won't do it because the chance of the egg fertilising after freezing is so low - almost zero - it is considered not worth it. For some reason, sperm freeze and embryos freeze, but eggs don't - or at least, they have not found out how to freeze them so that they are still good for fertilisation later.
We have currently put IVF on hold, pending some operations that have rather unexpectedly come up. We will see if after the ops, the FS believes conception could be possible without IVF. We'll see....
Hope this helps.
Aramis,
ShellShell is correct, the technology is not good enough to reliably freeze and store eggs. sometimes it is referred to in the media, but it is usually a mistake and they write eggs instead of embryos. Many people who are not familiar with IVF just assume that it is the eggs that are routinely frozen, but it is the embryos. Or the media may be referring to some experimental stuff going on in other countries. I think I recently saw a story about some successful freezing of eggs in china or japan, I think it was.
It is a real dilemna that you have, so hopefully you can sort something out. The only thing I can think of is that you "donate" the eggs that you do not want to fertilise to someone else, however that may also be against your wife's beliefs.
good luck
We have a similar quandary. We do not want any embryos to be discarded, and have been worrying over what to do.
Our clinic's protocol is to fertilise all eggs that are collected, transfer one only, and freeze any remaining embryos that are suitable. If we have more than three embryos on day 2, they will go to blast stage. Sure, we could opt to have only 3-4 eggs fertilised and discard the rest of the eggs, but I am also aware that not all eggs fertilise properly and not all embryos will make it to blast stage and I would much rather give all the chance of getting to that point rather than relying on the scientists to choose the right eggs - there's no way to know which egg will be the one that will make it all the way!
We also believe that financial stewardship comes into the argument as well - it's not financially viable to go through a stim cycle every time we wish to make an attempt - FETs are more cost effective, and also seem to require less medication from what I have read so far.
For us, we will stick with fertilising all eggs that are collected, and hoping that we can then make it through our entire family with FETs from that cycle. If the number of embryos is a manageable number, we'll go back until all remaining embryos have been transferred... however, if we still have a large number of embryos at the completion of our family, we will seriously look at embryo donation to another couple.
Of course, this is what we are thinking when we are only just getting started - things may change as we go through the process!
BW