It’s been over a month since I’ve posted. Crap. At first I was using the busy excuse, but the last week I’ve been doing a lot of sitting on my ass and watching Netflix, so I think that whole busy thing doesn’t quite cut it anymore. The only thing busy about me right now is my ovaries.
I am finishing up the stimulation phase of IVF. It’s been awhile, so I’m going to back things up a bit. On June 10th I received a gigantic box of medication.
That, ladies and gentleman, is what a couple thousand dollars of medication looks like. I just about peed my pants when I saw all of those needles. Almost 150 needles in that box. Not so great for someone who is terrified of needles.
Fast forward to the 14th when I actually had to start my injections. Casey was out of town visiting his dad for fathers day, so I had to do my first round of injections alone. The first night consisted of two shots, and they sucked. I’m still not sure how I was able to get through them both, I had a bit of a breakdown and spent half of the night crying.
The needle part wasn’t so bad. For subcutaneous (stomach) injections I was using a small 1/2 inch needle, and could barely feel the poke. The injecting part on the other hand, I could feel. I was not at all prepared for the burning that accompanied my second medication. It felt like I was injecting acid into my stomach. I generally don’t react well to needles, and this was no exception. My body immediately went into panic mode with an instant headache, dizziness, increased heart rate, nausea, etc. I felt like shit for the rest of the night.
For the second night I adjusted my strategy. I iced the area before hand, made sure my medication was room temperature, and injected as slowly as possible. Luckily, the burning and pain went down a couple notches. Still no where near the realm of pleasant, but mostly tolerable. The last few days I’ve added a new med, Ganirelix, to the daily regimen. While the Follistim and low dose HCG make my follicles fat, Ganirelix prevents me from ovulating too early. No way I went through all of this working growing these little bastards to have them float away into the Fallopian tube abyss. Ganirelix is hands down the worst injection, I’m actually glad I didn’t have to start until after I was a pro with the other ones. It burns. It itches. It stings. For hours. At least with the low does hcg the burning dissipates ten minutes or so after. Ganirelix makes the low dose hcg burning feel like a tingle.
Now, eleven days into stimulation I am almost 30 injections in. I still hate them. It hurts. I am always rewarded with a killer headache, but I am so fucking proud of myself for being able to make these injections my bitch. If you would have told me a year ago I would be laying on the couch every night watching Dexter and giving myself multiple injections I would have laughed at you. But, here I am.
So, what good are all of these horrendous injections doing? Follicles, my friends. I might go into the details of each monitoring appointment later, but for now I’ll stick to the summary. At my last monitoring appointment (that’s where they do a trans-vaginal ultrasound to check my uterine lining and follicles) my lovely ovaries were the proud owners of 14 follicles, all in the wonderful size range of 18mm to 20mm. I’m not expecting all of you to know how big follicles are supposed to be at this stage, so just trust me when I say they are right on track.
My monitoring appointments also required blood draws. I have had nine blood draws so far this month. (I swear I had a nightmare like that once). I used to faint after I had my blood drawn. Now, I (mostly) don’t even get dizzy. I still have to lay down, but there are worse things than getting a private room in the back of the clinic with a recliner.
I’m proud of my ovaries. Not so proud of the ridiculous level of bloating that I’m experiencing. Some lady at a department store asked when I was due. I can’t so much blame her, I do look about four months pregnant. The baby-less baby bump. Oh Joy. I’m so bloated and tender that spandex leggings are uncomfortable. Probably doesn’t help that I’ve jabbed about 30 needles into my stomach in the past week and a half. Good thing I’m not much of a pants fan.
The next step is getting all of these eggs out of me, the egg retrieval (someone clever came up with that term), which is happening tomorrow. Last night and today I do my trigger shots. These are the shots that force me to ovulate. Some trigger shots are one large intramuscular injection. Mine are two subcutaneous injections twelve hours apart. Apparently this is so we don’t shock my ovaries and cause ovarian hyper-stimulation (a very very bad thing). Ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome could potentially cancel the rest of the cycle, meaning that I would have to wait a month or two before transferring any embryos. As long as we keep my ovaries in check I should have one, or two, embryos floating around my uterus a week from now.
Hopefully I can manage to post an update with how many eggs we retrieved and how many fertilize before I go in for the transfer. There is a considerable drop off rate during this process. They say that out of all of the eggs retrieved about 70% will be mature. Out of all of the mature eggs, about 70% will fertilize. About 50% of the fertilized eggs will make it five days old for transfer. For anyone too lazy to do the math, that means about 25% of the follicles end up as viable embryos. Please don’t hold me to that, it’s very rough math, and everyone responds differently to this process.
If I get around to I might write another post about the craziness of morning labs at the clinic, the stress of monitoring follicles, and the joyous side effects of IVF medications. In the meantime, wish me luck. Keep those fingers crossed, and if you have some to spare send good thoughts my way. I have never been more nervous or more excited in my life.