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!