A fresh start

2025: a new year with so much potential. A full quarter century since my nearly-teenaged self rung in a new millennium to the ball drop in Times Square and the Y2K bug failed to materialize. More than anything, I'm excited for what this year won't be: a fertility year. Nope, my biological clock has been neatly tucked in a freezer. Ovarian reserve - what ovarian reserve? Any of my remaining eggs missed their shot. No, instead of being a disappointingly unproductive fertility factory, I can go back to actually being me: a circus artist; a hostess of board games and social events; a renewed runner; a world traveler; a high-value OG Neuralinker; a caffeinated tea connoisseur; and now, a (knock on wood) future mom.

Enjoying the holidays in the Bay, finally freed from the shackles of fertility treatments and figuring out how to just be me.

2024 wasn't all bad, either. I ran my first 5k race since high school. I got my first US patent! I went to the Olympics for the very first time, in Paris no less. I final mostly figured out how the nonsensical American health care system works. I got over a childhood phobia of blood draws. I got to be a part of the team that took Neuralink over the finish line into human users. And I made fourteen (or fifteen) genetically normal embryos.

You read that right: since my last update, we got news. So much news. That failed fifth cycle where nearly all the embryos had to be re-biopsied? Turned out all re-biopsied embryos were genetically normal: two girls and a boy. So, though they are unlikely to successfully implant, they're back-ups in the bank.

Feeling mixed emotions over learning all three of the destroyed embryos from our fifth cycle were genetically perfect.

And that seventh and final egg retrieval? We got SEVEN embryos - what a way to finish out the fertility journey. Genetic results came back a few days ago: three abnormal, three normal (all girls), and - get this - one more laboratory accident, something that occurs in less than 1% of samples handled at the new lab we switched to. That final embryo will also have to undergo a drastically damaging re-biopsy for us to learn its sex and chromosomal state. As one of the two day-5 embryos from our final cycle, it's statistically most likely to be normal.

The amazing news? We pulled off three cycles in a row with at least three genetically normal embryos per cycle! Including five day-5 embryos, something we never saw in our first four cycles. And, across all three cycles this fall, seven of the nine euploids were female! Less amazing (besides the fact that the first of these aforementioned cycles' embryos aren't exactly usable): we're still not done with embryo testing. Another embryo returned "no result" even with our new fancier lab, so we have to once more endure a highly destructive embryo re-biopsy to potentially learn we'd had a perfectly good embryo that a lazy embryologist destroyed through a poor biopsy on their first go.

I'm pretty salty about our luck: of twenty-three total cryopreserved embryos, we experienced four "no calls", a rate of over 17% whereas the national average is a mere 2%. Something's fishy in our clinic's embryology department. But when all is said and done, we have six not-rebiopsied euploid girls and four not-rebiopsied euploid boys. The collection includes one 6AA-scored embryo of each sex, and three day-5 3AB embryos (two girls and a boy). Not too shabby. Most importantly, all we could possibly need.

So in 2025, I get to just be me.