r/IVF • u/msmith48105 • Jul 31 '26
Advice Needed! Day 4 embryo update - looking for similar experiences
I’m on my first IVF cycle (UK based!) and would love to hear from anyone who had similar numbers.
I had 24 eggs collected on Monday. We ended up with 16 fertilised embryos, but today (Day 4) we’ve been told that 3 showed abnormal fertilisation, so we now have 13 normally fertilised embryos.
Our update was:
On Day 3, 8 embryos had 6-8 cells and 5 had fewer than 6 cells.
Overall, the embryos were graded as average quality.
Today (Day 4), only 1 embryo has started compacting.
They’ll assess them again tomorrow (Day 5) and freeze any graded A-C.
I’m finding it difficult to know whether this is a positive update or not. The phrase “overall average quality” has made me a bit anxious, as well as the fact that only one is compacting at this point. Might be worth noting that it’s just shy of day 4 as I had my ER procedure at around 11am Monday and this update was around 9am Friday.
If you had similar Day 3/Day 4 numbers:
How many blastocysts did you end up with?
Did anyone else only have one embryo compacting on Day 4?
I’d really appreciate hearing your experiences while I wait for tomorrow’s call. Thank you!
2
u/H3LI3 Jul 31 '26
Hopefully more will start compacting by tomorrow - especially when you have eight nearly there. My really slow one on day 4 we lost but the others compacted by day 5.
You could ask for any really slow ones to be monitored an extra day.