What Happens During an Egg Donation Cycle?

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Ask the Experts

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What happens during an egg donation cycle?

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Dr. John Payne, Piedmont Reproductive Endocrinology Group (PREG): The synchronization process, though,

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basically involves each woman coming on their menstrual period, at which point they would start oral contraceptive pills,

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and would be on those approximately three or four weeks until each woman had started the pills

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and, basically, we are suppressing each of their ovarian functions, so that we can control each side of the equation.

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And we would then stimulate the egg donor with injectable gonadotropins, which are in small needles, kind of like an insulin syringe.

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And they would do one or two shots a day for approximately 10 days, while they undergo some ultrasound monitoring

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and some lab draws to see how their stimulation is going.

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And when we get to a point where we would feel that if we do a transvaginal egg retrieval under IV sedation,

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that we would have the best chance to get the most number of mature eggs. We would do that at that point.

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During the time that the egg donor is undergoing the stimulation, the recipient is, at the same time,

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having her uterus primed to be able to accept the embryo.

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Three to five days after the eggs are retrieved, they can be transferred into the woman's uterus.

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And what happens on the day of the retrieval is the patient's partner, or, if donor sperm is needed,

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is used to fertilize the eggs that are obtained at the egg retrieval.

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And that is done is one of two ways: either standard insemination, where the eggs and sperm are put together in a Petri dish

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and are left in the incubator and are fertilized very similar to how they might in the fallopian tube;

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or, another, more advanced technology called ICSI, I-C-S-I, or intracyctoplasmic sperm injection,

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is used to actually insert one sperm into each mature egg and then you look the next morning and see which ones fertilize.

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And that technique is good if there are male factor issues in the fertility,

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such as a low sperm count or poor movement or lower numbers of normal-shaped sperm.

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Once we get the fertilization, we do follow the embryos for three to five days, which allows time to, hopefully,

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grow out to the blastocyst stage, which is an advanced stage of development of an embryo,

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and some of the embryos will kind of deselect themselves by not progressing, and, you know, then you would not transfer those.

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But you want to pick the ones that look the best on the fifth day. And, ideally, we transfer two embryos into the recipient's uterus.

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Hopefully, 12 days later they would have a positive pregnancy test

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and we would follow them like any one of our other patients in an early pregnancy situation,

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with some labs to make sure that the quantitative beta HCG, or pregnancy hormone, is rising appropriately.

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And then about four or five weeks after the transfer, look with an ultrasound to see, do we have one baby or two?

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Can we see a heartbeat? All the things that they want to know at that point.

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