The Case of the Missing Frostie

Frostie=Frozen embryo

In what seems like forever ago, I got a call from the embryologists lab that we had one embryo good enough to freeze. I cried my eyeballs out because I was sure that the first IVF would not work and how could I put all my eggs into one little frostie's basket? How did women ten years older than me get tons of frosties in storage? I had 22 eggs retrieved and ONE measly little frostie was left?? One thing is that my RE's office is VERY picky about what they will freeze, which is only day-6 fully expanded blasts (basically, the best). I know from doing tons of reading this is not always the standard at every office so I felt a little better.

I didn't think much of the frostie. I would donate the frostie to someone else or give the frostie to science. Until I realized that the frostie could possibly go from this:



to this:



Hubby is 100% sure he is done having kids. I was 100% sure I was done having kids. Here we are at three months, which I have heard is the honeymoon phase because the babies aren't just little and needy, they are little and heavenly and adorable and mom and dad start to think "we could do this again."

I went to get birth control from the OB. I was sure I would do this. But then I had a little panic because I would be taking away our chance at the surprise after IVF baby. But I don't like surprises so I got the prescription. I have had two perfect cycles with ovulation occuring at the exactly perfect time, which never happened when I was actually trying to have a baby. I am going to ruin it though, because I am certainly not ready now and hubby is definitely not ready and I think it is absolutely despicable to get pregnant when both parties aren't 100% on board (on purpose).

I can't drain my savings and my emotional bank doing IVF again while caring for two sweet babies because I feel that is selfish and I'm not strong enough to handle disappointment well. My OB said that there is a chance I could get pregnant without IVF so as soon as we feel like we might want more we should discontinue the use of birth control right away. Yeah right . . .

This caused my mind to wander to the frostie. We never received any type of confirmation that the frostie existed. We have no information on the frostie. During our consult they said any frosties would be saved for one year and then put on a plane to an out-of-state long term storage (I remember this because we had to sign a paper saying they are not responsible if the plane crashes and the embie thaws out, which might be one of the weirdest conversations I have ever had) and we would receive our rent bill (something else super weird to think about). The year has passed, so I thought I might have imagined this whole thing.

So I emailed the RE's office.

I did not hear from them.

I didn't hear from them once more.

I finally heard from them, FROSTIE FOUND!! Our ice monkey is still here in Kansas and they haven't gotten around to shipping it off, as I'm sure they don't have many with their stingy standards. We will receive a letter when it arrives at it's destination.

I KNOW that frozen embryos don't have the greatest success rates, but it's just a little bit of hope to hold onto that maybe in the future there will be a brother or sister for the monkeys and another little snuggle bug for mommy and daddy.

There will be foster brothers and sisters for Ocean and Ever, but we'll talk about that next time . . . .