The Missing Pieces

It's been a month since our disastrous frozen embryo cycle that resulted in our two remaining embryos being lost...one month...feels like it was just yesterday.


On Thursday, we had our follow up appointment with our RE and while I expected to get nothing out of this appointment (what really was there to talk about) I was wrong.  We finally have all of the missing pieces as to what likely happened with our embryo shipment and to say that I was heartbroken is an understatement.


Here are a set of pictures to help better understand why we lost our embryos...

Protective vial sitting in the cane.

These two pictures are what our shipment should have looked like when it arrived at the new clinic. You can see the loop/protective vial in the second slot at the top. This then hangs from the tank and is suspended in the liquid nitrogen.

The loop is inside the protective vial. The silver cap is magnetic that is supposed to hold the loop in the vial.

When they opened the tank, the loop had dislodged from the protective vial and was  sitting in the bottom of the tank. We now know that the embryos were dislodged from the loop either when it hit the bottom or when the loop broke.

This is a picture showing our broken loop at the top and what an intact loop should look like. So not only was the loop out of it's protective vial and sitting in the bottom of the tank, the loop was also broken. Our poor embryos never stood a chance.

How did this happen? It's most likely that the problem occurred in shipping. Adam and I, along with the doctor and embryologist played around with the loop/cane and discovered that with just a little shaking and turning it side to side...the loop very easily fell out of it's protective vial. All it took was one FedEx drivers carelessness with our precious cargo to destroy our dream...and that is just simply heartbreaking.