The last two clumps

We were told the embryologist would call us the next morning to give us the update on the two embryos still in the lab. Morning came and went with no word, and I was okay with that, but by one o'clock I emailed the IVF nurse, telling her we were still waiting. She immediately emailed back that she would pass my message along to the lab. H called again around two thirty and discovered the embryologists were all in a meeting. I was technically supposed to to be on bedrest still that day, but opted to go into work, and the irony was that the most stressful thing going on that day was the fact that my little embryos were languishing in a lab and I had no idea how they were. I was really mad about the bad 'service' we were recieving. H was beside himself. The embryologist called at three and H missed it, probably while we were conversing in tense whispers in the hallway at work about what ho's those bad embryologists were. H listened to the message, which was very thorough, but called the Dr. back for even more information and then IM'd me to pow wow in the hall again to hear the news. He had me listen to the message.

It was a very nice calm and sympathetic voice saying something like this: "...your embryos were not even morula's on the day of transfer and we were hoping they would grow into morulas and then even reach blastocyst stage. We only freeze blastocysts. Your embryos continued to divide, but then began to die today, having never even made it to morula stage."

All that week I had been comfortable with the idea that embryos were being weeded out as our numbers dwindled. But for some reason thinking of the last two scrawny cell clumps struggling to survive and then just dying in a petri dish really tore me up. I cried a little bit listening to the message, but just took a minute in the bathroom to pull myself together and went back to focusing on anything but the things truly weighing on my mind.