No Calls Today

For the first time in a LONG time, I do not expect to get any calls from SGF today. Normally, every day, I'm anxiously looking at my phone every hour waiting for results on something (blood work, or dosage changes, or trigger times, or monitoring appointments, or embryo growth, blah blah blah), but today, I can relax. And by relax, I mean wait impatiently for tomorrow.

It is officially T-24 hours until Embryo Transfer - the final step and moment we've been waiting for! Last night I updated our calendar with our big countdown. I actually don't think I ever posted a picture of our crazy calendar on here since I first got it, so I will now. You can see all my notes on medication and monitoring appointments at the bottom! This calendar started out with my birth control phase, but then once I ran out of room I erased that part at the top and continued the end of March and beginning of April at the top. Now I have all the big milestones in there. Back in the two week window of injections, putting a check mark on each day was what I lived for. Probably going to be the same way checking off the days till our pregnancy test, only, less shots.

I did call this morning and schedule my blood work pregnancy test for the 5th! The lady asked me what time and I said 7am, cause duh, I'm going as early as possible. So, other than that, no updates today. I'll post tomorrow after our transfer and you can FINALLY see our awesome transfer day shirts that I ordered like 2 months ago!!!!!

9:15!!!!

Oh and minor update since I posted this earlier.... I was told to schedule my pregnancy test for April 5!!! SO SOON! Bring on the 2 week wait!!!!

Our official embryo transfer time is 9:15am on Thursday!!!!!

We have to arrive 30 minutes before and there are all these complicated instructions on when to empty my bladder and how much I need to drink, etc etc. They like you to have a full bladder for the transfer because it makes your uterus easier to see on the ultrasound.

Unlike the egg retrieval, the embryo transfer procedure is much easier! I won't be put to sleep and the whole process should only take 5 minutes. They simply guide the embryo into your uterus with a catheter! I believe we will be able to see everything on the ultrasound which will be super exciting!!! How many moms get to see their baby when he or she (hopefully she) is just an embryo?!

CAN'T WAIT!!!!!

So much waiting

I'm back at work today! Know what's crazy? This is my first full day at work since March 9. Yup. Bye bye sick time. Although I know this day is going to drag, it was kinda nice getting up this morning on my old normal routine and not having to go to SGF for monitoring. For the first time in weeks, we will not be at SGF for 2 days straight (today and tomorrow). My bruised arms are so happy.

Today is going so slow though and I'm just waiting for the call. I want to know so badly what our transfer time will be Thursday!! This process involves SO much waiting and I'm not patient. At all. Also totally wishing there was such thing as a live microscope cam so we could watch our little embryos. Then I really would be distracted and get nothing done.

This week is going to be LONG. I'll update later once I hear my time!!

Rollercoaster

A rollercoaster of emotions and sickness - that's what this past weekend consisted of. On my last post, I was on the up-swing. As of yesterday morning, my bladder was healing, I was feeling good, and I was thankful to have the worst behind me. It didn't last long though, because by 2pm, I felt like I was on my death bed again...

The hospital doctor had given me an antibiotic to prevent a UTI (which can sometimes occur when you have a catheter). It was just a 3 day antibiotic, so around 11:30 on Sunday, I decided to take the first one - couldn't hurt right? Meanwhile, I had also started all of my hormone medication that SGF instructed me to start taking after egg retrieval - Estrogen and Progesterone.

Around noon, I started feeling a little nauseous, but I figured it was probably because I took the medication on an empty stomach. We got some lunch, but by 1-2pm, I was the most nauseous I've ever felt in my whole life. I threw up all afternoon and was back to crying and screaming from my bed. That led to crying and laying on the bathroom floor because I could not stop throwing up. There was literally a moment yesterday afternoon that I felt so awful I wanted to give up and throw in the towel - I was SO done being sick. My mom came over again and luckily was able to prescribe me some anti-nausea medication that worked wonders fairly quickly. 

All late afternoon/evening I had these awful sharp stomach contractions and I didn't know where they were coming from. That was the problem with all of this - I was on so much new medication I didn't know what was causing what. Were my symptoms from the surgery? The punctured bladder? The hormone medication? I was so exhausted from the day that I fell asleep around 9pm and slept like a rock for the first time in awhile. And somehow, I woke up feeling SO much better.

Since today was finally Monday and no longer the weekend, we were able to call Dr. Sagoskin first thing this morning. I told him I was feeling better today, but had quite the weekend, and he told me to come in to do some tests this morning just to make sure all looked good. I was thrilled to finally have him back and be able to get everything checked out. We got to SGF around 9am and went back to the monitoring floor - it has only been 3 days since we were there every single day, but it felt like forever! And as if I hadn't already been poked enough over the last few weeks, I got to get my blood drawn again by Carlyene, for old times sake :) Boy was she surprised to see me! I made sure to tell her about the anesthesiologist that attempted to put the IV in my left hand - she laughed.

I also got a urine test done and ultrasound. Dr. Sagoskin came back in the ultrasound room to take a look and chat with us some. We concluded that it was definitely the UTI medication that made me super sick yesterday. Apparently the hospital prescribed me the "double strength" version of the antibiotic, and my stomach did not agree with it at all. He said the stomach contractions I was having was most likely my bladder trying to deal with the clotting. He prescribed me some meds for that, but said not to worry about taking it unless the contractions started coming back - which, luckily, they haven't yet today. I've also been taking my Estrogen and Progesterone still today, and haven't felt any nausea, so I think that pretty much narrows it down that it was the UTI meds. And thank goodness, because if the hormone medication was going to make me that sick, there was no way I was going to be able to take it every day.

The best news from today? Our 4 little embryos are still growing strong!! Today is considered Day 2 and embryos are supposed to double their cell count every 24 hours. Yesterday they were 2 cells, and today they are expected to be 4. Our Day 2 report showed we have three embryos at 4 cells (right on schedule!) and one over achiever at 7 cells already! YAY!

We won't get any further growth updates on them now, because they like to leave them alone without too much interference. But! Tomorrow we will get a call to let us know our official embryo transfer time for Thursday!!! Eeeek!!!

I'm still feeling good as of this afternoon (thank goodness!) and Kyle and I are treating ourselves to a day of relaxation after a weekend from hell. He's taking the night off work just to make sure I'm ok for a solid 24 hours - cause at this point, who knows what will happen lol. 

Hoping the worst really is behind us now, that our embryos continue to grow perfectly, and we CANT WAIT for our transfer on Thursday!!!!!!

Four.

4!! We have 4 healthy fertilized eggs as of this morning!!!!! I couldn't be more thrilled!

We had an interesting evening. I didn't sleep much and I was super uncomfortable with the catheter in. This morning it was really becoming painful and I asked my mom if we could try taking it out to see if I could pee on my own yet. It was risky, because if I couldn't, I would have to go through the pain of putting a new one in. But gosh it felt amazing to get it out. I was able to get up and shower and feel like a human again. I did try to pee shortly after taking it out and I passed a pretty big blood clot. I was completely grossed out, but my mom said that was great and means I'm healing! I expect to have another one come out at some point because we saw two on the ultrasound yesterday, but no luck so far. I have been able to pee some on my own so far today and it's becoming more clear and less bloody.

I'm a little crampy occasionally from the surgery, but not bad at all. That's the frustrating thing about this complication. If my bladder didn't get punctured, I would have been completely recovered by now! Ugh...

But, knowing we have those 4 growing embryos is making me so so happy today. I'm just hoping they are strong and can make it the 5 day growth period until transfer day on Thursday. We will only be transferring one, so any extra we have will be frozen. I'd love to have an extra one or two frozen because then if the embryo that we transfer doesn't implant, we could potentially do a frozen embryo transfer on another cycle without me having to go through the nightmare the past two weeks has been again.

For now we are hoping my bladder continues to heal and that those embryos keep growing perfectly over the next few days!

Pre-Retrieval Day!

UPDATE: My blood work came back and the trigger did it's job! We are officially set for tomorrow! While on the phone with my nurse, I asked her how many eggs they expect to get from my retrieval - no one has really given me an estimate yet, and I'd like to have a number in my head so when they tell me tomorrow, I know if it's good or not. I said earlier my goal was 10, but that wasn't really based on anything other than the number of bigger follicles I have and what I've read online. Tina said 10 would be high - she said it's possible they would get 10, but only 5-6 would be mature. This seems low to me. I know so many people through my Facebook groups that get 15-20 eggs per retrieval, so I'm a little worried at the idea of only having 5-6. Out of those 5-6, it's possible only a few will fertilize normally, and then we still have to see how many make it to the 5 day blastocyst stage to be transferred. I'd be completely devastated if we got to our transfer day and none made it - I literally can't even think about that. I know we only need 1, but it's hard looking at the numbers and percentages and worrying. Please pray we get a good number of high quality mature eggs tomorrow and that they fertilize normally!!!!

Got our second call last night with all of our official times! We were instructed to do the Lupron trigger at 7:30pm last night, we need to arrive at SGF tomorrow at 6am to prep and then my retrieval will be at 7:30am - exactly 36 hours after trigger! I was super happy with this time because although we will have to get up super early tomorrow, it will be nice to just do it first thing, get it over with, and not have to sit around thinking about it all day.

My Lupron injection went fine last night! Didn't hurt any worse than the others and I was SO happy to be DONE with injections!! We went to SGF this morning to get my blood work done for the last time (woo hoo!). It was crazy packed and we had to wait awhile because my official appointment time was 9:15am (all they had), but I had to get my blood drawn between 7-9am to see if the trigger worked. So, they told us to just arrive whenever and they would take us in between patients. While we waited in the waiting room, I never saw Carlyene come out once to call back a patient, so I was convinced she wasn't there today. But after waiting 20 minutes, she surprised me when she came out to call my name! I said, "whew I thought you weren't here today!" and she goes, "well, I'm working in the back today, but they pulled me up here to come do your blood work" - I felt so special. Really, I just think all the other ladies hate me cause I try to tell them they are wrong when they miss my veins. I don't care though, I say it every day, I love Carlyene. When she was done drawing my blood, she said, "this vein here, this is the good one, they should use this one tomorrow for your IV." I said, "ok I'll tell them!" To which she replied, "oh no don't tell them, they don't like that, let them search and then if they are poking around, tell them Carlyene told you to use that vein" HAHA I love her.

Still waddling around in pain, but I'm home from work today just relaxing and enjoying the fact that I don't have to do any injections so I'm in a great mood. Kyle and I are going to see Beauty & the Beast tonight too - SO EXCITED!

Tonight I have to take a one time medication with dinner to prep for surgery. To be honest I don't even know what it does, but it's a PILL and that's the greatest thing ever. We will be getting up bright and early tomorrow morning and leaving the house by 5:15am! Kyle has to "produce his sample" before we leave - his ONLY job in this whole process. [Although, I guess I can't make fun of him too much since he's been great support.] I believe when we get there tomorrow he will be with me the whole time. The actual procedure itself only takes 30 minutes, but they said to expect to be there for about 3 hours. They will be putting me under anesthesia, so I think all that prep and then waking me up takes some time. I'll probably be a little sore afterwards, but they will tell me as soon as I wake up how many good eggs they got, so I think I'll be so excited to find out and be done that I won't care much. They haven't told me how many they expect to get, but my own personal goal is to have at least 10 mature eggs.

Still waiting today to hear my blood results from this morning. As long as my body responded to the Lupron correctly, we will be good to go!

How crazy is it that we will have fertilized eggs by tomorrow?!?!?!? AHHH! So exciting!!!!!

TRIGGER DAY!! (IVF day 12) & Monitoring

UPDATE: WE ARE DONE!!!!!! Hallelujah! We are officially triggering tonight, no more injectable meds (besides the trigger shot), and I am SO HAPPY!!!!! We have to wait for another call later tonight to tell us our exact trigger time and surgery time on Saturday. Just 2 more days to get through and then all the hard stuff will be over!! Also, as expected, we are doing the Lupron, not the hCG, so I'm not as terrified. This one should be similar to all of my other injections I've done, so hopefully it won't be too bad. I am nervous about doing a new one, but it's just once and this is the LAST INJECTION so who even cares at this point. We go back tomorrow for blood work to make sure my body took the Lupron correctly and NO MORE ULTRASOUNDS! YAY!

I put a blank in the title of this post, cause I really don't want to type out that it's another stimulation day, and I'm not sure yet if it will be. So, I'm thinking positive and hoping it's not another day of stim meds.

Yesterday they gave me the "1 more day" talk, which, I feel like they've been saying for 3 days. I somehow made it to today and I'm not sure how. I was seriously hoping we'd see our primary nurse or Dr. Sagoskin at monitoring this morning, but no luck. Since it was just the tech, we didn't really get any indication on what the plan is for today, so I'm watching the clock tick waiting for our call. I really don't think I can handle another day, so I'm not sure how I'll handle it if that's what they tell me.

Last night's injections sucked. They hurt more and more each day now and I'm falling apart. I cried for the first time last night since our first day of injections. I didn't sleep very well cause I can't move without it hurting. Monitoring was fine. Carlyene was there again and got my blood. Although getting my blood drawn is really starting to become painful because my arms are so bruised up. My follicles are still growing although it seems like the big ones keep getting bigger and the small ones are just hanging out. So I'm really worried they will want me to go another day (please no). 

We made an appointment to go back again tomorrow cause we will need it no matter what. If it's another day of stims, we will be back for blood work and ultrasound. If we trigger with the Lupron tonight, we will have to go in for blood work to make sure it took. So either way, my arm is getting poked again tomorrow. Yay. But I'll be much less grumpy about it if it's the latter.

I somehow waddled my way into work today. Only planning to try and make it 4 hours though and I mostly came in so I could get my laptop and do some work from home tomorrow (cause I definitely don't think I'll be up for driving to work tomorrow). It sounds dumb, but literally my drive in is the worst part. I take all back roads and every bump I hit hurts my ovaries. Plus, since I get to work so late, there's no parking and I have to walk (I mean, waddle) SO far to get to my office. 

I'll update later.  Sorry for my grumpy mood. Please keep happy thoughts for me that today will be trigger day.

Stimulation Day 11 & Monitoring

UPDATE: Heard from our nurse. Officially doing another day of stim injections. *insert crying emoji here* I'm SO done. My ovaries hurt, I'm uncomfortable, I can barely make it through work today. I have no idea how I'm supposed to do another day. Probably only going to work partial days Thursday and Friday - I'll be at SGF in the morning anyway and be taking sick time, so I'll probably only work 4-5 hours each day just cause I can't make it a full day at this point. Since I won't be taking a full day of sick leave for surgery now, I'll have the time to take half days. Tomorrow BETTER be the last day. 

Other notes... Estrogen is at 2,303 now, so we are most likely definitely doing the Lupron trigger. Also my uterine lining was 11mm today which is GREAT. They like it to be 8-13mm for transfer - we need lots of thick lining in there for the embryo to implant into!

Ok I'm off to try and survive for another 24 hours....

I REALLY didn't want to title this post as another "Stimulation Day," but unfortunately, that's what it's looking like.... I'm SO frustrated cause I really wanted yesterday to be the last day...

Monitoring went fine this morning, other than the fact that I'm completely sick of it at this point. My girl Carlyene got my blood on the first try again - gosh I love her. I think I need to remember to make Kyle take my picture with her next time. She is the BEST. Ultrasound looked good, but the tech and nurse think Dr. Sagoskin will want me to do another day of stims. I have lots of follicles that are right on the line of being mature, so they think he will want me to do another day so that hopefully some more will catch up and we will have more eggs to retrieve. I know I need to do what's best, but I'm just so frustrated and done being poked. 

Even though they don't think I'll trigger today, we did still meet with our primary nurse, Tina (who is finally back from vacation), to get our trigger instructions. Basically right now it's a balance between trying to get those last few follicles to catch up in size, while also making sure my estrogen doesn't get too high. Tina explained this a lot to us today and also helped me understand better how Dr. Sagoskin makes the call on which trigger medicine to use. They don't like your estrogen getting past 2,500, so if you're getting close to that, they tell you to use the Lupron trigger because that has less of a chance of making you go into OHSS (Ovarian Hyper-Stimulation Syndrome) than the hCG. Tina said since my estrogen was 1,771 yesterday, it will probably be around 2,100 today, and with another day of stims, be right around that 2,500 mark tomorrow. So, she thinks we will probably end up doing the Lupron instead of the hCG. I'd be happy about that because that needle is much less scary.

So if we don't trigger today, then we are looking at a Saturday egg retrieval instead of Friday. Ugh. I guess it's kinda good cause I won't have to use as much leave from work, but honestly, at this point I don't know how much I'm going to be able to be at work the rest of this week anyway. I made it here today, but I'm beyond uncomfortable at this point. It hurts just walking around or going up the stairs. All I want to do is lay down. And besides the physical side effects, mentally, I'm drained and I can't easily focus on anything else. 

Of course all of this is speculation based on what the nurse told me today. I'll still have to wait for my call from her this afternoon to see what the official plan is based on what Dr. Sagoskin says. I suppose there's still a chance he could have me trigger tonight. Otherwise, it's the usual schedule of injections tonight, Cetrotide in the morning, and then back for monitoring again. We made an appointment for tomorrow already, but we weren't able to get our normal 7am time slot, so we'll be going at 8:15am instead.

Feeling a little let down today, but trying to stay focused. I'll post an update later once I get the afternoon call.

Stimulation Day 10 & Monitoring & SNOW!

UPDATE: Heard from our nurse! Not triggering today (which is what we expected). Estrogen was at 1,771 (holy crap!) and I have 10 measurable follicles. This means if we did egg retrieval now, they would expect to get at least 10 eggs from those 10 big guys! [they hope to get 10-15, so that's pretty good!] I have a bunch of smaller follicles too, so they are having us do my stimulation injections for another day to see if some of the others will catch up. Same dosage of meds tonight, Cetrotide in the morning, and then yup, you guessed it, monitoring in the morning for blood work and ultrasound! Tonight will be our 10th day of stims, and the stim phase is usually 10-12 days, so I expected to be doing them at least for tonight. Really hoping this is the last day though and we will do our trigger tomorrow!! My mom is tentatively planning to stay the night at our house tomorrow night so that she can do the trigger shot (I don't really trust Kyle for that big thing!) Hoping for a Friday egg retrieval!!!!!

Low point in my life: Waddling (because I'm super uncomfortable at this point) with a red burning rash on my stomach from a 5:45am injection, in blasting ice-wind, in the dark, to our Jeep parked on the main street in our neighborhood (so that we wouldn't get plowed in) to make it to our 7am monitoring appointment where I would, for the 5th day in a row, get blood work and ultrasound done. Yeah...

But rewind a little bit first... Same dosage injections last night. They hurt more than normal for some reason. I think I'm just running out of space on my stomach and now we are re-injecting into spots that are already tender. I started getting super uncomfortable yesterday afternoon and last night. Like, hard to bend down, turn over in bed, uncomfortable. I woke up about every two hours last night because I couldn't get into a good position. Making all these eggs is hard work!

I was SO worried about this morning. Kyle had to go back to his normal night shift last night for the first time since we started the stimulation phase (last week he was training and worked during the day) and I was so worried he would have trouble getting home in the snow on time to give me my injections and get to our appointment on time. He took an hour of leave and left at 4:45am - it took him an hour to get home - 270 was awful!!! Luckily we had plenty of time. We got my Cetrotide injection done and then got out the door by 6am - we weren't sure how the drive would be and how long it would take us to get to SGF.  Our Wrangler took the snow like a champ! While the roads were completely awful, we didn't run into any issues, and it was nice going on 270 on a weekday with no traffic! We ended up getting there super early at 6:30am. It was funny watching all the SGF staff struggle in. Apparently Shady Grove pays for the staff to stay in hotels nearby when there are big snowstorms. They were a little slow to get things moving this morning, but we were the only ones in there so they took us right away!

AND my reliable blood work nurse was there! (I now know her name is Carlyene). Score! I've been there so much they all remember me now and I'm officially known as "Carlyene's girl." The one lady (who missed my vein 3 times yesterday) looked at my sheet when she walked in and went, "Oh Carlyene your girl is here!" - You're damn right! Give me Carlyene - that girl knows what she's doing! Again she got my vein on the first try - thank god!!

Ultrasound also went good! Dr. Sagoskin was there so he came in to check in with me. Lots and lots of follicles growing on both sides. They are keeping an eye on the biggest ones - I have 2 at 20mm on the right and one at 19mm on the left. Those are good guys!! But we also want some of the others to catch up in size. Dr. Sagoskin said there's a tiny chance we might trigger today depending on what my blood work looks like, but most likely, we have another day of stims and will be back again tomorrow for monitoring.

[ FYI - The trigger is the final step in the stim phase! Basically once they decide your eggs are ready, they tell you to do your trigger shot that evening. The trigger is a final injection that completes the maturation of the eggs and preps them for retrieval - it has to be done exactly 36 hours prior to retrieval. We were given two different trigger medications, hCG and Lupron, and Dr. Sagoskin will make the call on which one we use. I believe we will do hCG because that's the most common, but we will have to see. The Lupron is a subcutaneous injection like we've been doing, so it shouldn't be as hard, but the hCG is an intramuscular injection with a HUGE needle. I'm terrified of it. ]

If we trigger tonight, my egg retrieval surgery will be Thursday. If we trigger tomorrow (more likely), retrieval will be Friday. Even though I'm so ready to be done, I'm hoping for a Friday retrieval because Kyle has a test on Thursday and wouldn't be able to come to my surgery depending on what time it's scheduled for.

So now I'm just waiting on the call from our nurse on next steps for tonight. Although the snow was a pain, it was kinda a blessing in disguise because it allowed me to work from home today and rest a bit. I took a nap once we got home from our appointment which was SO needed and I'm loving being able to wear pajamas instead of my work pants - they were reallyyyy starting to hurt me yesterday.

Once I hear back I'll post an update!