One Good Egg

After an increasingly agonizing six-week wait, I finally received my PBB/CGH results: out of ten embryos, there was one normal and one no result. While I wouldn't say I'm over the moon, I am very happy to have one normal. It was my first ever (to my knowledge) and my expectations had been extremely low, so it was really good news. Of course, now I sorely wish I had gone for the 5-day biopsy and that this normal were a highly-implantable blast rather than a two-day old embryo that had only been tested via polar body biopsy on the maternal side and with a long road of growth ahead of it. Nonetheless, I’m still incredibly thankful and have counted my blessings more than once. What’s most exciting is that this means I’m still producing normal eggs, and I’m doing so at a rate that is consistent with my age group despite having a translocation.

But what a difference a year makes. It’s clear to me that the translocation is actually becoming the lesser of my problems. Even without it, I would have had only two normals this cycle, as only one embryo of the abnormal bunch was discovered to have a singular chromosomal error (monosomy 14) caused by the translocation. Every other embryo displayed complex aneuploidy. The geneticist forwarded a list of the chromosome errors per embryo and it actually made me cringe. I've spent so much time cursing my translocation (with good reason), but it's hard to be angry at yourself for simply living and aging. While I had long assumed my eggs had already started feeling the inevitable effects of age, seeing the speed with which they're doing so is a bit alarming. Still, knowing that I have one good egg is an important milestone for me. If there's one, there's bound to be more, and I'm going to find them.