The last four tubes of frozen sperms
October 11, 2016
How to grasp the last chance?
In a frustrated manner or an optimistic manner?
A real story was shared by the doctor of Stork Fertility Center.
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted..." ~ Ecclesiastes 3, Bible.
As the King Solomon said, there is a beginning and an ending in everything, including the human body. However, most of us are not ready to face the end.
I met this couple at the clinic suite in a beautiful day.
The couple have been married for seven years. The husband was diagnosed as congenital bilateral absent of the vas deference, CBAVD. He has undergone MESA and TESE twice. In CBAVD cases, testes are able to produce motile sperms, but have no vas deference to transfer these sperms. Finally, the produced sperms would be metabolized and then reabsorbed by the surrounding tissue. Thus, the CBAVD cases can collected the available sperms through operation for IVF purpose.
The IVF program was not that difficult for the wife. She has undergone the program twice before, and was familiar with the stimulation injection and retrieval operation. As a 40-year-old woman, collecting 18 oocytes in a single cycle was a very good result. However, the result of TESE was not that good—few motile sperm were found. Moreover, the urologist told the husband that his testes could not tolerate the TESE operation anymore due to testicular fibrosis. The frozen sperms which have been collected before were their last chance.
Although the amount of oocytes was enough, the quality of sperms was not good enough. Eight embryos were formed after fertilization (all IMSI), and six blastocysts were cryopreserved. After two failed FBT cycles, they only had two frozen embryos and four tubes of frozen sperms. To increase the success rate of IVF, this couple decided to do IVF program again and create more available embryos.
Thirteen oocytes were harvested in the following cycle, and six embryos formed, and four blastocysts were stored. After another failed FBT, I transferred the last three embryos for them.
Fortunately, one of these three embryos was implanted. The amniocentesis report showed that they had a healthy baby girl.
I remembered that the first time I met them at the clinic suite. Both of them had warm smile and optimistic manner to the future program no matter how hard they have tried to have baby.
I knew they would reach a happy ending in this journey. And they really did eventually.
