And then there was... one. Again.

Turns out my day peaked well before my clinic finally got around to delivering today's news. Give me the flowers on my walk with Lily or those snuggles with Chat and Furnie over this car crash of a medical call any day.

We started out so much more promising this time! On Monday, our day 3 report came in with double the number of embryos we'd had last time. I was so hopeful going into today - after all, the clinic explained to me that 40-60% of embryos make it from day 3 all the way to day 6. Sure, last cycle only 25% of ours survived, but with such low numbers last month, I wasn't going to extrapolate. And then we came out with half of last month's survival rate. Yes, only 12.5% (aka one lone survivor) made it out of this month's cycle. Cool, cool. Technically, our little trooper got graded with the most perfect score in every grading category, so you go little one! But we still have another two weeks to wait to learn if he or she is chromosomally normal. If not, it's automatic disposal per clinic policy. And so my fertility hell continues.

Okay, so disappointing news aside, here's something cool. This surviving embryo got scored on three categories:

1. Expansion stage, meaning how quickly it developed (that's the number). A score of 6, the highest possible, means this embryo "hatched." Did you even know humans did that? Apparently when we were a few hundred cells big, each of us had a shell that we had to hatch out of before implanting in our mother's womb. Mind blown.

2. The quality of the inner cell mass - what would grow to become the baby (that's the first letter). An A means there were many tightly packed cells.

3. The quality of the trophectoderm - the outermost layer of cells - what would grow to become the placenta (that's the second letter). An A means there are many cells forming a cohesive layer.

This is what the internet tells me that a 6AA looks like. It's not ours but I still think it's neat so I figured I'd share.