Five days ago the doctor's office told me that of the seven eggs retrieved, five of them took to fertilization. Today, I received the call about the second hurdle: how many of the fertilized eggs divided enough to become blastocysts. Of the five we started with, only two made it to the blastocyst stage. Those two have been biopsied for genetic testing and frozen to await the results. This has been the toughest stage for us so far: It takes about 2 weeks to learn whether the blasts are chromosomally normal (that's a long time to wait), and none of the blastocysts tested from the first two rounds passed. Basically, I'll spend the next two weeks (a) trying not to think about it, (b) trying to remain pessimistic so when the results come back I'm not completely crushed, and (c) trying not to go down the rabbit hole of next steps when we have no idea what the test results will say (if it's normal we start talking about a transfer, if it's abnormal again we start talking about whether to proceed with more rounds of IVF or whether to try with donor eggs). So that's it for now. The next update will be in two-ish weeks.