Day 15 - Egg Retrieval!

Day 15: Friday, September 23. Poke count 47

16 Eggs Retrieved!! 

That's 16 possible embryos! Statistically half of those will not be mature and half of the embryos that do grow to 5 days will have the defective gene. If everything goes by those numbers we should have around 4 healthy embryos!

I took a sedative, an antibiotic and Tylenol at 6:45AM and we went to the fertility center. We live less than 5 minutes from the center so we luckily don't have to go too far. They brought us back to a procedure room and had me change into a gown, foot covers and a super sexy hair net. The nurse came in to start my IV but had no luck. The vein in my left arm likes to roll around and the one in the left "goes all crazy" and shoots to the side right where they always try to draw blood. How may people does it take to start an IV? apparently 3, two nurses and an anesthesiologist. they finally got one started in my left hand.

Once they took me to the procedure room everything moved pretty quickly. I layed there for a few minutes watching them hook up machines and getting everything ready. They had me confirm my name and birthday, sign a piece of paper and then it was time to start. It's a strange feeling not remembering an entire chunk of time with several people staring at your...parts. The last thing I remember is the anesthesiologist talking about how he loved the Eagles music that was playing on the radio and him injecting the anesthesia into the IV tube. Brian said at one point they opened the door and he could hear the suction machine they use to retrieve the eggs and it sounded like a small generator.

When I woke up from the anesthesia I remember telling Brian about the "moon boots" I got to wear. They use stirrups like they do for any annual exam, but they have these boots that hook onto them to keep your legs in place while you are asleep.Brian said I told him I was feeling emotional and wanted to cry. He said "It's ok, you can cry"...and I did. I cried and cried and cried. I think I reacted the same way to anesthesia when I had my tonsils removed. I just become very emotional when I finally do wake up. I was in a great deal of pain too. I was having shooting pains from my lower abdomen all the way down through my legs. They gave me a heat pack for my stomach, which helped a little bit but they said everything I felt was normal.

We got home around 9:30Am and I went straight to bed. I woke up around noon for a few minutes and went back to sleep till after 3PM at which point I was still feeling pretty crappy. I felt like someone had punched me repeatedly in the abdomen and had severe pelvic pain. I have just been on the couch the rest of the day and the pain comes in waves. If I'm sitting in the right position I can get pretty comfortable but any movement hurts all over. It's slowly getting better as the night goes on and hopefully I'll be feeling great tomorrow morning.

They will call us tomorrow and let us know how many eggs were successfully fertilized. We are, of course, hoping for all 16! I'll start Lupron injections in the next couple weeks and once I get a period I will start taking estrogen. This will help prepare my uterus for the embryo transfer in 4-6 weeks. I have a post-op appointment in 2 weeks, but other than that no more appointments for a bit!

-Emily

IVF cycle: stims day 7 and 8

Day 7: Thursday, September 15: poke count: 21

There is so much pressure in my lower abdomen I feel like I might pop! I'm getting flashbacks to 5th grade frog dissections. There's always a few female frogs who just explode with eggs when you cut them open...I am the frog. I feel like I have developed a waddle! Every step I take puts more pressure on my abdomen.

This rubber ball is my spirit animal

I started the Cetrotide this morning so I won't ovulate. The only difference between Cetrotide and the other injections I have done is that it is refrigerated. It took a lot longer for the powder to dissolve in the fluid with it being cold. I actually had to mix it up a bit where the other meds that I have to mix dissolve in a flash. The temperature also makes the liquid thicker so it's harder to push the plunger down on the syringe.
No change in the headaches. Still just a dull pain for the majority of the day. I am really hoping that the follicles will have grown enough by tomorrow's appointment so we can schedule the egg retrieval.  It's only been one week and I'm ready to be done with the stimulation phase!

Day 8: Friday, September 16. Poke count: 25

My 3rd appointment for ultrasounds and bloodwork was today. There are 8 follicles on the left ovary and 8 on the right. Each of the follicles range from 7mm to 15mm and they need to get to around 20mm. They are growing as they should but some of them are still small. They want me to continue with the Menopur and gonal- f through Monday, meaning I have to order more medication. I only had enough meds to get me through Sunday night so I had to order an entire vial of gonal-f just for one more dose...bummer! That stuff ain't cheap!

I have another appointment on Monday at 7:30AM and they are almost positive that I will be ready for my trigger shot at that time. The trigger will help the eggs break away from the follicle wall and make the egg retrieval easier. Hopefully this weekend will bring on more follicle growth and we can get lots of eggs next week!

-Emily

Shots, Shots, Shots Shots, Shots!

We had our meeting with Ashley, the nurse who will be handling our IVF cycle, on Tuesday. She was very knowledgeable and informative. We left the meeting feeling pretty good about the next step of this process.

Ashley went over all of my medications that I will be taking during this process. I was overwhelmed with the amount of medications that they will be prescribing. Overall I will be taking 12 different medications. Not all of them are injections, some of them are just a pill I will take before or after a procedure and I won't be taking them all at the same time. Ashley wrote out a great chart and list so we can keep everything straight.

They are starting me on a new birth control pill that delivers a consistent dose of hormones throughout the month, instead of it changing week to week. It also has an extra low level of estrogen in the pills. Who knew birth control pills could be so different? Ill take only the active pills in this pack and the next so I will not have a period. This is so once RGI lets us know that they are done creating the gene probe, we can start our IVF cycle without waiting for another period.

I will start with injections of a drug called Gonal-F, which is a follicle stimulating hormone, every night between 6PM and 8PM. This will cause an increase in the number of follicles and help with the quality of the eggs. I will also be taking a drug called Menopur at this time. Menopur delivers the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hcg), which helps with the growth and maturation of the eggs.

I'll have ultrasounds and bloodwork every 2-3 days while taking the hormone injections. My doctor will adjust my medications and tell me when to move onto the next step based off of my lab work and the ultrasounds of my ovaries. About 6 days after starting the Gonal-F and Menopur, I will begin daily morning injections of a drug called Cetrotide. Cetrotide blocks luteinizing hormone which is released as a result of the Menopur. Basically it prevents me from ovulating so all those health eggs stay right where we want them!

About 6 or 7 days later, based on my test results, I will give myself an ovulation trigger shot called Lupron. This gives the eggs a little extra boost to mature and causes them to break away from the follicle wall. The will stay in the follicle and will be extracted along with the fluid inside the follicle during the egg retrieval. This shot has to be given exactly 35 1/2 hours before egg retrieval. This one looks large and I've heard It's pretty painful! I'll probably have someone do this one for me so I don't hesitate too much and miss my time window. If anyone has ever felt the desire to stab me, let me know and this might be your shot.

36 hours later they will be retrieving the eggs from my ovaries. I have opted to be have an anesthesiologist there so I will not be awake during the procedure. Ashley said some women say they are fine being awake as they give you Fentanyl and Versed to calm you down and make you drowsy. I just know I was nearly hyperventilating before the mock embryo transfer and that was a very negative experience for me. I would rather not be aware that they are stabbing me with a needle the size of my arm and just take a nice nap.

Once they have all of the eggs, they will fertilize them and leave them in the incubator overnight. The next day they will tell us how many have successfully been fertilized. On day 2 they will update us on how many have continued to grow. On day 3 they will leave the embryos alone and let them incubate more and on day 5 the embryologist will come to collect the biopsies. Because so much growth is done in that 5 day window, the embryologist will come late in the day. He may need to come back the next morning to biopsy any embryos that were not ready on day 5. Our embryos will then be frozen until it is time to transfer them back into my uterus.

It takes 2-3 weeks to test all of the embryos and I will need to be on some other medications during this time and even more after the embryo transfer. I'll go over that whole process another time so I won't bore you. Ashley gave me a list of online injection training videos to watch. the small shots in the stomach don't look like they will be too bad, the needles are super tiny! The Trigger shot and Progesterone shots that Ill be on later look extremely painful. Something about the line "inset the entire length of the needle in a quick, dart-like motion" makes me cringe.

We also had to sign paperwork to determine what will happen to our embryos if something were to happen to us. We had to decide who would take custody of them if we were to split up. This would only determine who would be financially responsible for the cryopreservation of the embryos until a court hearing could be held. We also had to designate a guardian for the embryos if we were to die. My mom has agreed to be the guardian and Brian and I will tell her our wishes for if something were to happen. If god forbid something happen to us, we want our embryos to be donated to a couple who cannot have biological children of their own.

It was strange having to make all of these decisions at this point. What once seemed so far away could now be starting in just a few weeks. We have a ton going on the next few weeks, so I am sure it will be here before we know it!

-Emily