June 2016 - IVF #3, Day 21 of Shots

Today is day 21 of injections...Day 19 of the heavy stims.  This cycle has been exhausting.  You know that feeling you get when you are about to get sick?  Like your body is worn down and working in overdrive to fight off the bug.  Arms and legs like jello and brain is foggy.  That feeling took over during the second week of shots and settled in for the duration.  This grogginess is accompanied by soreness and bloat in my lower abdomen (partly from the 4 shots a day and partly from my swollen, angry ovaries) as well as the occasional need to burst into tears...thanks hormones!  I'm feeling a bit of a wreck, as you could probably guess.

Day 21.  I did NOT think this round would go this long.  The first round was 15 days of injections, the second was shorter (albeit unsuccessful).  Before you think it, I'm not even close to giving up.  I would do this another 21 days if it would ensure us good eggs.  I would probably break down and cry long and hard if it was going to be that much longer, but I would put my big girl panties on and get it done.  Thankfully the big girl panties can stay in the drawer because we are now close to the end.  Also, why do we still have different words for men's and women's underwear?  Since we womenfolk no longer don pantaloons, isn't it all just "underwear"?  A friend of mine at work is potty training her daughter, and her son, a 4yr old, was rightfully confused as to why his sister has "panties" and he has "underwear"...but I digress.

As of yesterday's scan we are in pretty good shape.  Yesterday was the third check since Sunday (yes, they had me come in on a Sunday - follicles don't stop growing on the weekends!) and the 9th ultrasound and bloodwork check since starting shots.  We have 4 strongly growing follicles, two on each ovary, and a couple of tiny ones.  The 4 had diameters that measured 19mm, 17mm, 14mm, and 13mm.  The target range is 15-24mm, and since my estrogen level is continuing to increase as planned, they wanted to give them all another day to grow.

Here's the calendar so far for round 3:

Today will be draw #10 since shots started and draw #God-knows-how-many for this fertility process as a whole.  Yesterday I asked the blood draw tech, "Lori, are you sure there's any left in there to take?" She smiled sympathetically, said, "Well, let's see!".  She rubbed the tender bend of my right arm looking for a vein where a quarter-sized bruise has formed.  She took some more, wrapped me back up, and gave me a big hug before leading me to my exam room for the ultrasound.  I barely feel it anymore, and I even have the constitution to watch them doing it, which I never used to have.  I remember telling her how "I really don't care for needles" during the first visit, adrenaline starting to throb through my veins in anticipation of the needle.  Almost funny to think of now...

Today's check will determine whether we keep going with shots or if we trigger tonight.  My nurse told me to have medicine through Friday, just in case we needed to keep going, and once FedEx arrives today, we will be all set on medicine, either way we go.

When my RE decides that it's time to trigger, this is what happens:

• I will not take my evening shots of Lupron and Menopur
• Instead, I will take 2 simultaneous injections of Ovidrel, aka "trigger shots", which will be the last of the injections for this round
• These are the ones I wrote about before.  The active ingredient, HCG, is also commonly used as a performance enhancing drug in sports.
• Some IVF patients will only take 1 trigger shot (I just did 1 in my first round); since this medicine helps the eggs finalize their development and achieve maturity, my dosage last round and this round has been 2 shots.
• The nurse will give me a precise time to administer the trigger shots...to the minute.  This time coincides with my retrieval, which will be scheduled exactly 36 hours later.
• They make you sign a form specifically acknowledging this responsibility, and they remind you at several points along the way how important this is.
• The goal is to extract the eggs from the follicles before the follicles release / ovulate them naturally.  If the timing is off, and I ovulate before retrieval, there is no way for them to find the eggs.
• After the trigger shots, we wait and make sure we show up exactly when we are supposed to for the retrieval procedure.
• At this point, if we trigger this evening, the earliest our retrieval can be is Saturday morning.

Since we are day-to-day at this point, I will go to my check today and wait to hear back from them once my blood tests come in and my RE reviews them (usually around 2pm).  Following instructions to a T!  My mother probably thinks that's hilarious...