Mrs Astronomer has been woozy and not-quite-with-it since the IVF egg collection yesterday morning, and to be honest she’s not brilliant today. She’s in a bit of pain but nowhere near as bad as she was immediately after egg collection, when she was as grumpy and woozy as a hibernating bear with toothache.

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“No! Go away!” (Lost Astronomer, Mar 17)

I have found that the best way of dealing with the situation is to retreat to a safe distance and throw chocolate.

We got a phone call from the IVF clinic this morning, letting us know how fertilisation had gone. Rather, Mrs Astro took the call, as I was in the middle of a skype call with my open university group, which is not when you want to have a particularly important phone call turn up. Cue lots of frantic hand waving and people at the other end asking who hadn’t turned their phone off… The clinic informed us that of the ten eggs collected, six were mature enough for fertilisation and of those, five were successful. They’ll let us know on Thursday what the best course of action is. Five isn’t a bad tally; it gives us something to play with, and maybe even might leave us with one or two eggs to be frozen at the end of the process in case it all fails and we need to give it another go, or in the event I get flattened by a bus (Ha! In your face evolution! Now, not even death can prevent me passing on my genes!). It’s not a massive margin of error, but it’s better than nothing.

Mrs Astro has been getting better; she’s almost back to her old self, but she’s still woozy and grumpy. She’s been  sworn off the following things:

  • Driving
  • Cooking
  • Housework
  • Alcohol
  • Baths
  • Boiling water
  • Knives (!)

I shit thee not, it’s on paper in black and white. Consequently, there have been many demands for cups of tea and knife juggling displays.

We managed a walk this afternoon in the fields around Follytown, glorious in the early March spring sunshine. She was pretty tired afterwards and needed a nap quite badly. She’s still not 100% and complaining bitterly about her ovaries. Can’t say I blame her. She’s had a rough week; we’re rather hopeful this works, because she really doesn’t want to go through that whole cycle again.

I’m trying not to count my zygotes before they hatch (Five. There are five zygotes.) but so far it all seems to be working. However, the success rate for fertilisation is 98%, so that means the biggest hurdle is yet to come; we still have a 60% failure rate ahead of us. It’s hard not to get a little bit excited though. We’ll lose a couple on transfer, and there will be a little more attrition on the way… We might be lucky and get away with having one or two eggs left at the end. Or we may not. It’s still far too soon to tell.

So, having said all that, I still think I’d better curb my earlier optimism and keep looking both ways before crossing the road. One or two frozen eggs isn’t that many, after all.