The age at which she is a mother is currently superior to that of a few decades ago and this is contributing to many couples having fertility problems and having to end up using the advances of science to achieve a pregnancy. The problem is that to make use of these services you have to rely on technology and, you know, technology sometimes fails, and not everything is fixed by tapping it.
I'm talking about what happened a few days ago at the Hospital de la Paz, in Madrid, where one of the containers in which 172 frozen embryos were stored was found at room temperature, that is, without being able to be used.
Faced with this ruling, the Human Reproduction Service of the hospital contacted all couples to explain the situation and to offer them the possibility of undergoing a new treatment cycle in order to get new embryos. So far they have quoted 70 women for consultation, seven have reported that they do not want to repeat the cycle, five have not yet spoken and the rest have decided that they do want to submit to it. In any case, the hospital has already reported that, of the 172 affected couples, 122 already got a previous pregnancy.
Everything happened a month ago, when they observed that the container did not contain liquid nitrogen inside and that, consequently, the embryos were at room temperature. Curiously it was the last container that was purchased for the service, the newest, which arrived in 2010.
They have looked at the records of the revisions of the container, to discover where the fault comes from, and they have seen that 5 days before finding it empty it had a correct level of nitrogen. Controls are done weekly, sometimes once and sometimes twice a week, so in principle everything should have worked correctly. However, assessing the level of nitrogen after a new filling observed that the level decreases little by little, so confirmed that there was a nitrogen leak, whether due to excessive evaporation, or because there was a loss. Now the unit is working with one less container, although they ensure that there is "sufficient capacity to handle all cases."
In short, this is what it is, when you have to rely on third parties or various devices, this can happen. It is not a human error, but simply an elusive leak. The problem, of course, is that it is not like when you have a leak at home, that a technician is coming, fix it and go. We are talking about embryos, treatments and hopes, after all. Things that happen.
