Cumbersome and explosive
Within the early days of IVF, embryos earmarked for storage had been slow-frozen. This system includes steadily reducing the temperature of the embryos. However as a result of gradual freezing may cause dangerous ice crystals to type, clinics switched within the 2000s to a method referred to as vitrification, during which the embryos are positioned in skinny plastic tubes referred to 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. Among 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.
COURTESY OF SARAH ATKINSON AT REJOICE FERTILITY.
Just lately, she was tasked with retrieving embryos that had been saved inside a glass vial. The vial was produced 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 gadget snapped, a small shard of glass flew out and hit Atkinson’s face. “Hit me on the cheek, lower 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.
Atkinson has a folder in her workplace with notes she’s collected on varied units over time. She flicks by it over a video name and factors to the notes she made in regards to the glass vial. “Would possibly explode; put on face protect and eye safety,” she reads. Just a few pages later, she factors to a different embryo-storage gadget. “You need 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 residence in Ohio to the clinic in Tennessee 5 occasions 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 child has arrived, Archerd is eager to fulfill him. “The very first thing that I observed when Lindsey despatched me his footage is how a lot he appears like my daughter when she was a child,” she says. “I pulled out my child ebook 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 child, however doing so could be “a dream come true,” she says. “I want that they didn’t reside so distant from me … He’s excellent!”
“We didn’t go into it considering we might break any information,” says Lindsey. “We simply needed to have a child.”
