I had my egg retrieval in the spring of 2018 and wound up with 4 frozen embryos: two 5-day blasts, two 3-day cleavage stage. I had very little understanding of <a href="https://glowing.com/glow-fertility-program">IVF</a> then and my clinic was extremely overwhelmed with the amount of business they had at the time so I never asked, and they never volunteered, why they froze 2 at cleavage stage (I’m in NE Ohio and my clinic is the one that made national news for losing a freezer with 4,000 embryos, likely due to human error at this time; they were ridiculously busy). Despite their original suggestion to transfer a cleavage stage embryo at the time, we ended up transferring one of the blastocyst. It was successful and I now have a beautiful baby boy, and 1 blast and 2 cleavage stage embryos left.

When I met with my RE last month (a different Dr than before because my previous RE moved), she mentioned that my cleavage embryos were absolutely perfect, which caused me to ask why they froze them rather than allowing them to become blasts. She explained that their head embryologist in 2018 felt it was best to freeze perfect embryos at that stage when there weren’t a lot of fertilized eggs to work with (we had 8) so that at least they had some to transfer in case none of the others got to day 5. (She also mentioned that this is no longer their philosophy.)

For my upcoming transfer we now need to decide which embryo do we transfer: one of the perfect cleavage or the “decent” blast. Her recommendation was to thaw a cleavage, allow it to develop into a blast in the lab and if it makes it, transfer that. If it doesn’t make it, thaw the blast and transfer the blast, so either way it would be a 5-day blast transfer. She also said we could just opt to transfer the cleavage on day three or the blast on day five.

Wow this took a while to type out. My question is: how likely is it for a cleavage transfer to be successful? And is it more likely that the perfect cleavage will develop to 5 days in me than in a lab? What would you guys do?