With most embryos arresting and one cycle already failed, a patient transferred three fragmented day 3 embryos—and welcomed a healthy baby girl.
⚠️ These stories are personal experiences, not medical advice or scientific evidence. Success stories are more likely to be shared than unsuccessful ones, so they should not be interpreted as proof that a treatment works. Always discuss treatment decisions with your doctor.
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📊 Story Snapshot
👩 Age: Not stated📆 Years trying: Not stated
🧬 Embryo: 3 day 3 embryos, poor quality
🧪 Retrievals: 2
🐣 Transfers: 1
💊 Diagnosis: Male factor infertility
📈 Outcome: Live birth
We did a second round of IVF after a completely failed first round with no frozen embryos out of 8 fertilized. We have male factor infertility and it was the worst sample my husband ever gave, and that is saying something.
6 of our 9 fertilized embryos arrested even before this day 3 transfer, and the 3 remaining embryos underwent direct cleavage (cell division one to two cells then very quickly jumping to 5 cells, as seen on an embryo scope) and were very poor quality (5 cells on day 3 and highly fragmented). I cried as they brought me a picture of the 2 embryos they wanted to transfer: I asked if we could cancel the transfer and get our money back.
Seeing me upset they asked if we wanted to do a hail Mary and throw in all 3 because that’s all we had. They brought a picture of all 3 left, and the new embryo in the picture that they almost left to inevitably die in the lab had much more symmetric cells and even “prettier” fragmentation than the two they originally wanted to transfer.
I knew it wouldn’t work, so I didn’t even test beforehand: I had zero hope. Well, I was SHOCKED when I got the call that my pregnancy test was positive, and I almost thought they had mixed up my lab results with someone else’s. And now one of those embryos is my 28 month old daughter, perfectly healthy!!!
In all the studies I read, direct cleavage alone is a death sentence for an embryo and 1 to 5 cell cleavage is pretty much unheard of (1 to 3 or even 4 being more common), all the more so direct cleavage resulting in a slow-growing, highly fragmented embryo. I’m convinced my daughter is the embryo we almost left behind in the lab, and I don’t think she would have survived there since all 16 of our others died before they could be frozen: it’s as if my tears saved her life! I still can’t believe her story to this day even though we lived it!
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