Cumbersome and explosive
Within the early days of IVF, embryos earmarked for storage had been slow-frozen. This method includes steadily reducing the temperature of the embryos. However as a result of gradual freezing could cause dangerous ice crystals to kind, clinics switched within the 2000s to a way known as vitrification, through which the embryos are positioned in skinny plastic tubes known as straws and lowered into tanks of liquid nitrogen. This quickly freezes the embryos and converts them right into a glass-like state.
The embryos can later be thawed by eradicating them from the tanks and quickly—inside two seconds—plunging them into heat “thaw media,” says Atkinson. Thawing slow-frozen embryos is extra sophisticated. And the precise thawing methodology required varies, relying on how the embryos had been preserved and what they had been saved in. A number of the units must be opened whereas they’re contained in the storage tank, which might contain utilizing forceps, diamond-bladed knives, and different instruments within the liquid nitrogen, says Atkinson.
Sarah Atkinson, lab supervisor and head embryologist at Rejoice Fertility, instantly injects sperm into two eggs to fertilize them.
COURTESY OF SARAH ATKINSON AT REJOICE FERTILITY.
Lately, she was tasked with retrieving embryos that had been saved inside a glass vial. The vial was created from blown glass and had been heat-sealed with the embryo inside. Atkinson had to make use of her diamond-bladed knife to snap open the seal contained in the nitrogen tank. It was fiddly work, and when the system snapped, a small shard of glass flew out and hit Atkinson’s face. “Hit me on the cheek, reduce my cheek, blood working down my face, and I’m like, Oh shit,” she says. Fortunately, she had her security goggles on. And the embryos survived, she provides.
The 2 embryos that had been transferred to Lindsey Pierce.
Atkinson has a folder in her workplace with notes she’s collected on numerous units over time. She flicks by means of it over a video name and factors to the notes she made concerning the glass vial. “May explode; put on face defend and eye safety,” she reads. A number of pages later, she factors to a different embryo-storage system. “It’s a must to thaw this one in your fingers,” she tells me. “I don’t prefer it.”
The record-breaking embryos had been slow-frozen and saved in a plastic vial, says Atkinson. Thawing them was a cumbersome course of. However all three embryos survived it.
The Pierces needed to journey from their dwelling in Ohio to the clinic in Tennessee 5 instances over a two-week interval. “It was like a five-hour drive,” says Lindsey. One of many three embryos stopped rising. The opposite two had been transferred to Lindsey’s uterus on November 14, she says. And one developed right into a fetus.
Now that the infant has arrived, Archerd is eager to fulfill him. “The very first thing that I seen when Lindsey despatched me his photos is how a lot he appears like my daughter when she was a child,” she says. “I pulled out my child guide and in contrast them facet by facet, and there’s no doubt that they’re siblings.”
She doesn’t but have plans to fulfill the infant, however doing so can be “a dream come true,” she says. “I want that they didn’t dwell so far-off from me … He’s good!”
“We didn’t go into it considering we might break any data,” says Lindsey. “We simply wished to have a child.”
