Cumbersome and explosive
In the early days of IVF, embryos earmarked for storage were slow-frozen. This technique involves gradually lowering the temperature of the embryos. But because slow freezing can cause harmful ice crystals to form, clinics switched in the 2000s to a technique called vitrification, in which the embryos are placed in thin plastic tubes called straws and lowered into tanks of liquid nitrogen. This rapidly freezes the embryos and converts them into a glass-like state.
The embryos can later be thawed by removing them from the tanks and rapidly—within two seconds—plunging them into warm “thaw media,” says Atkinson. Thawing slow-frozen embryos is more complicated. And the exact thawing method required varies, depending on how the embryos were preserved and what they were stored in. Some of the devices need to be opened while they are inside the storage tank, which can involve using forceps, diamond-bladed knives, and other tools in the liquid nitrogen, says Atkinson.
Sarah Atkinson, lab supervisor and head embryologist at Rejoice Fertility, directly injects sperm into two eggs to fertilize them.
COURTESY OF SARAH ATKINSON AT REJOICE FERTILITY.
Recently, she was tasked with retrieving embryos that had been stored inside a glass vial. The vial was made from blown glass and had been heat-sealed with the embryo inside. Atkinson had to use her diamond-bladed knife to snap open the seal inside the nitrogen tank. It was fiddly work, and when the device snapped, a small shard of glass flew out and hit Atkinson’s face. “Hit me on the cheek, cut my cheek, blood running down my face, and I’m like, Oh shit,” she says. Luckily, she had her safety goggles on. And the embryos survived, she adds.
The two embryos that were transferred to Lindsey Pierce.
Atkinson has a folder in her office with notes she’s collected on various devices over the years. She flicks through it over a video call and points to the notes she made about the glass vial. “Might explode; wear face shield and eye protection,” she reads. A few pages later, she points to another embryo-storage device. “You have to thaw this one in your fingers,” she tells me. “I don’t like it.”
The record-breaking embryos had been slow-frozen and stored in a plastic vial, says Atkinson. Thawing them was a cumbersome process. But all three embryos survived it.
The Pierces had to travel from their home in Ohio to the clinic in Tennessee five times over a two-week period. “It was like a five-hour drive,” says Lindsey. One of the three embryos stopped growing. The other two were transferred to Lindsey’s uterus on November 14, she says. And one developed into a fetus.
Now that the baby has arrived, Archerd is keen to meet him. “The first thing that I noticed when Lindsey sent me his pictures is how much he looks like my daughter when she was a baby,” she says. “I pulled out my baby book and compared them side by side, and there is no doubt that they are siblings.”
She doesn’t yet have plans to meet the baby, but doing so would be “a dream come true,” she says. “I wish that they didn’t live so far away from me … He is perfect!”
“We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records,” says Lindsey. “We just wanted to have a baby.”
