This morning as I was walking to the fertility institute I saw a woman carrying a gift bag that I immediately thought was decorated with colorful, striped, and polka dotted sperm. They were birthday balloons. It was a birthday gift bag. I think this helps to illustrate how much this process has taken over my life. I no longer feel that I have a full-time job other than trying to keep straight all of my medications, appointments, and continually researching and reading about assisted fertility. The good news is that by virtually ignoring everything else in my life I don't feel terribly overwhelmed. Yet.
I got my period on Wednesday like clockwork (two days after stopping the progesterone) and so I went in today to start the IVF cycle. I've still been taking the ovary-suppressant injection, so as of this morning my ovaries were clear and calm. The doc said everything looks good, so I stopped that drug and started on the follicle stimulating hormone today.
Instead of doing one injection as I did the first two IUI cycles, or two like I did in my third IUI cycle, now I'll be getting a quadruple dose. But the cool part is that they want me to put it all in one injection. So I use one syringe of water but mix in four vials of powder. Sounds like a crazy amount of hormones, but at least it'll be all in one injection. They gave me two this morning and I will do two more tonight, but for the next couple days i will do four vials each night. I go back on Monday to see how things are progressing.
If all goes according to plan, the egg retrieval will take place on Tuesday, November 8. That's assuming that my ovaries respond to the stimulation as they should and I have enough developing follicles by then. If not, we may have to continue stimulation a bit longer. I am guessing I will be going in for frequent ultrasounds to check on progress, even more than with IUI. And of course this is a much longer stimulation period than with IUI. Hopefully the meds don't make me feel awful or go crazy. And hopefully they work! I don't want this to drag out any longer than already expected.
I have all of this paperwork to take home for the hubby and I to read and sign. I had some consent forms with the IUI, too, but nothing like this. Today I had to sign off on all of the medications, saying that I understand their purpose and the side effects, and on the IVF procedure itself. I was interested to see that they asked us to consent not just to IVF but also to ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection), which is when they determine that sperm quality is too low to fertilize on its own, so they inject it right into an egg. (This may be an issue for us since we know the hubby's morphology wasn't great in his analysis last fall.) We also have to consent to assisted egg-hatching, which I think is when a fertilized egg can't break out of its shell and continue developing into an embryo. I knew about both of those procedures but thought they might occur in a later IVF attempt, perhaps if there were problems with earlier tries. I asked the doctor about this and she said they leave those decisions up to the embryologist but that very often they will decide to take those additional measures; we need to consent to them just in case. This made me happy - it's nice to know they're going to pull out the whole bag of tricks on the first try if needed.
We also need to give consent for them to freeze any embryos that we don't use this cycle and make all kinds of decisions about what happens to them afterwards - say if one of us dies or if we don't need them for future cycles. Which is kind of a strange situation, to have little frozen possible babies of ours in a lab somewhere. Weird.
Overall, I am still feeling mostly excited and optimistic about all of this, so let's hope that continues. With not too much hormonal craziness. Fingers crossed.
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