My own special "hatching" project

[FollowTheSun]

So it's been making me smile with snake breeding/hatching season-- seeing how many eggs were laid, how many grew and didn't rot, how many hatched, and what colors/morphs/genders they would turn out be.

I've had my own project all this time, too.

Partner and I wanted to have a kid, but it wasn't working, so we went to see a specialist. I was told I was not making any eggs. It was recommended that we use donor eggs and his sperm and do IVF.

So . . we chose a good donor (kinda like looking at on-line dating sites) and we were able to afford exactly 6 eggs. Of those, doctor said we would, with any luck, end up with 1 or 2 usable embryos. Once an embryo was transferred to my womb there was a 50% chance it would take and grow.

This was a HUGE gamble, but we vowed to live life without regrets, so we went for it, knowing we would regret not at least trying. We had to jump through a LOT of hoops just to get started.



I started to prepare my body with patches, shots, and pills. It was intense, including the mood swings!



Through this process I did 56 intramuscular shots of progesterone in oil, along with estrogen patches.




Our 6 eggs were shipped to us from across the country and prepared. This was the nail-biting part.

-- On day 1 all six eggs thawed which is ahead of the curve

-- 5 of them successfully fertilized. They had to manually inject the sperm into them because once frozen, the membrane is too stiff for natural fertilization.

-- On day 3 we had 5 still growing

-- On day 5 we had 4 good ones left! The embryologist had to assist-hatch them, meaning to open the egg membrane to allow them to grow, because once again, the egg membrane was too stiff to release the embryo after being frozen.

This is the day I had one transferred to my womb, and the other 3 were frozen.

Here is our embryo on day 5 of fertilization, fully "hatched" out of its egg membrane. You can see individual cells already migrating and differentiating.





Then I had to wait until day 9 to test . . . and . . .



Two weeks later we had an ultrasound and saw and heard a heartbeat! It hardly looks like anything at that stage and it's amazing that it had a heartbeat that early.



Two weeks after that, it looks like a gummy bear (seen upside-down in this photo)



Two weeks after that it looks human! The head is to the right, legs stretched out to the left, "lounging" with its hands behind its head. It was doing full flips during the ultrasound session.




I'm now almost 4 months pregnant and still hoping and praying for the best, but so far everything looks great. It will be a bit of a mystery what the baby turns out like-- the donor looks nothing like me. She is half African-American, half Irish. Partner has flaming red hair and blue eyes. But that's part of the adventure!