Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)

There are various reasons a couple turns to PGD. Inherited genetic diseases that could possibly be passed on to a child is probably the most well know reason. Another use of PGD is for gender selection to "balance" a family since PGD will tell you which embryos are boys and which are girls (an ethical debate I am not prepared to engage in here). In our case we turned to PGD to find a possible answer to why 21 embryos, whilst looking good in the lab and growing in cultures to as far as day 7 did not make it to a pregnancy. Dr W advises PGD after a couple has 2 failed fresh cycles and in our case we had 2 failed fresh and 4 frozen cycles. Since all the embies always looked so good and grew so well we really had to believe that I was the main problem and we didn't really expect PGD to give us the answers we were looking for but thought we should try it anyway given this was our last shot.

We were wrong, so wrong.

Yesterday we received the report giving the results of our genetic testing. Apparently, for a reason we will never know, we do not make good embryos. They look pretty and grow well, but that is all. You would normally expect abnormal embryos to die off early on, but not ours, they might not be perfect, but they are fighters, for as long as they can be, and I'm proud of them for that.

The type of PGD testing that was carried out on our embryos tests chromosomes X, Y, 8, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21 and 22. These are the more common problems found with abnormal embryos. Each chromosome should consist of 2 chromosomes, 1 from the mother and 1 from the father, any more or less than 2 would be considered abnormal.

Our results;

Of 11 embryos available 2 could not be tested since they had no nucleus.
1 embryo had 1 chromosome abnormality
1 embryo had 2 chromosome abnormalities
4 embryos had so many chromosome abnormalities there is no point in listing them all
1 embryos did not have any normal chromosomes at all

That leaves 2!!! 2 (recorded as normal) embryos consisting of 2 chromosomes in every category required. Instead of "normal embryos" I like to think of them as miracle embryos or rays of hope.

In case you are wondering whether our rays of hope are male or female, we don't know. We asked Dr W to black out that part because we don't want to know.

I'm sad that for some reason we make such a high number of abnormal embryos, of course we wish that wasn't the case, and we'd really like to know why we do, but we never will know, and those are the facts so we have to accept them. It does gives us the answers we were searching for, even if not the ones we wanted. Our "normal embryo" percentage in this cycle was 18%. Using that percentage on our previous cycles it would suggest that although we thought we were putting back 21 good embryos in reality it may have been just 3 (or none).

At this point dwelling on the above is pointless, the most important part is that our 2 good embryos have been transferred to Jenn and we have hope. Of course it's possible they may have issues we haven't tested for, but for now we are going to put that to one side and assume they are just perfect.