@Katie12444 Hey, I literally just got off the phone to our clinic. I’m currently taking medication to prep for another round.
all our scans and medications are now confirmed.
Estimated egg collection date Wednesday 7th June. But could be the Thursday or the Friday.
The clinic are great and have given us lots of information.
essentially the mosaic has a higher risk of not implanting and a higher risk of miscarriage but if it does take and if it does make it to a live birth, then we’ve been told the baby will have absolutely no greater risk of genetic abnormalities than any other pregnancy.
it’s hard to wrap my head around because on the one hand that is very reassuring (in terms of the babies health) but on the other hand, I can’t help worrying about the abnormalities they have found in some of the cells. Surely it’s not good!
basically a mosaic is one with healthy cells AND genetically abnormal cells. If (like ours) the degree of mosaicism is not too great, then the expectation is that the healthy cells will be able to override and correct the unhealthy ones.
if this doesn’t happen then you miscarry or it never implants.
if this does happen then you have a good chance for a healthy pregnancy and birth.
I do want/ need to ask about whether there is a higher risk to the placenta. But that can all wait until we are making decisions prior to transfer. So there’s time still.
Right now (although it feels a bit disloyal to our mosaic embryo!) I’m just really hoping we get a completely genetically normal embryo from our current round.
they told me that in the past mosaics were treated as abnormal but in America they started transferring them and found they can result in a healthy baby so they are now considered worthwhile transferring. However, the mosaics with a lot of abnormal cells are considered unviable. Luckily our us not as affected. They currently have a grading of low, moderate and severe. Ours falls in the low/moderate.
we have been told that soon the low and moderate mosaic embryos will be classed as ‘normal’ alongside their genetically normal counterparts… and there will be a much simpler grading system or ‘viable/ normal’ and ‘not viable’/ ‘abnormal’.
they couldn’t do this sooner because they needed to prove that mosaic embryos were safe and did not create babies with chromosomal abnormalities.
A large percentage of embryos (across natural conception and ivf) are actually mosaics… we just don’t know every tine it happens because only a small percentage of embryos are genetically tested! Like ours…
Both our embryos looked perfect (AB and BB) so if you think about it, if we hadn’t tested them, we would have transferred them both and been none the wiser.
ironically, the higher graded embryo (our AB embryo) was the abnormal one (definitely not compatible with life) it had more than one complete duplication and also deletion of whole chromosomes… yet without the genetic testing we would have prioritised it for transfer and it would have ended in miscarriage.
The BB is our mosaic (so there’s really no way of reliably predicting from the grading!) our clinic warned us that even the most perfect looking AA embryos can come back as genetically abnormal and they would not be allowed to transfer.
I guess my thinking is-
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I’m so glad we can genetically test so I avoided transferring that AB embryo, which would have resulted in more heartbreak and lost time…
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I’m happy to transfer a low risk mosaic, that has a slightly higher chance of not implanting or miscarrying… if it’s our only chance… because without the testing (which most people don’t do) we would have been advised to do so and we’d be nine the wiser about the mosaicism.
for all I know, my 2 year old son (conceived in the same way at the same clinic) might have been mosaic too… (his genetic tests showed he was a genetically normal embryo BUT they only take a few cells (from the outer cell mass, which becomes the placenta, not the inner cells which become the baby) and mosaic embryos are made up of clusters of both normal and abnormal cells, so it’s possible that the embryologist can take the sample of cells from a cluster of normal cells and then this gives a false ‘normal’ result, when in fact the overall embryo is actually mosaic. Mad.
Apparently there was a raging debate about the reliability of a test that samples placenta cells and not the actual inner cells mass, but our clinic tells us this debate is now settled and science has proven that placenta cells give a reliable result that can predict the chromosomal make up of the embryo itself.
but I guess there is still room for error because they only take a few cells to sample so it’s possible to misdiagnose embryos overall composition, based on just a few cells, given that the definition of a mosaic is that it is an embryo made up of both normal and abnormal cells. Depends which cells you sample, as to what ‘result’ you’ll get.
im sure this will all become clearer in years to come, especially as technology advances.
I just hope we get lucky. All of us 🤞🏼
deep breath.
the turnaround for my cycle has been very quick. I had a small bleed following the egg collection and one period… and now we are straight back into the next round. No time to think or breathe.
how are things your end? This is such an exhausting and emotional rollercoaster 🎢 hope you’re doing well :)