A little background: B and I became friends freshman year of college and were roommates for 3 years after college before I married Paul. She's more or less been adopted by my family and usually comes with to visit them at least once a year. Grandma, my mom's mom, lives on a farm and used to make wedding cakes on the side. Here's the cake she made for me and Paul for our wedding (Paul actually designed most of it with her):
B has since become fascinated with the art of cake decorating and likes to ooh and ahh over all the tools whenever we go to Grandma's. So as part of her Christmas present last year, I arranged for Grandma to give us a cake decorating lesson. Now, Grandma had tried to teach me once or twice when I was younger, and let's just say I didn't exactly inherit her artistic abilities. This time around, I did a little better (according to Grandma it was "all right"). Here's some of our finished work:
Anyway, it was a fun weekend filled with laughter, icing, Pennies (a card game) and dominoes, and LOTS of food. It was good to have Mom and B there to distract Grandma while I disappeared into the bathroom for 20 minutes or so each night to shoot up. Although I was getting better at the whole mix-and-inject routine, it still took a while each time. She doesn't know anything about our IF struggles or treatments and it didn't seem like the time to explain everything.
On our way home Monday, I called to schedule my monitoring visit for Tuesday. We are required to go to the main clinic for procedures and physician visits, but there are a number of satellite locations that we can utilize for routine monitoring (i.e. blood and dildocam) if it occurs on a day that I'm not already going to be in the city for work. Unfortunately, the one closest to where I live doesn't have ultrasound on Tuesdays, but I was able to get an appointment at another facility that was a little further away but not all the way into the city.
During my dildocam exam, the tech rattled off several numbers corresponding to my follicles. In general, it sounded like I had 2-3 that were already over 15 mm, and several more that were smaller but visible and would likely continue to develop. It was pretty cool to see them on the screen. After the blood draw, we headed home so I could get some work done (it was office renovation day so I had already planned to work at home). That afternoon, one of the IVF nurses called to deliver my results. I don't remember the exact numbers, but she said all was looking good and they wanted me to continue with my same doses (225 units of Bravelle and 75 units of Menopur) as well as start the Ganirelix injections that night. I was to return for monitoring the next morning.
The rest of the week was a blur of daily monitoring visits and injections, so here's a recap:
Wednesday - monitoring in the a.m. followed by Bravelle (225 units) + Menopur (75 units) + Ganirelix (1 pre-filled syringe)
Thursday - monitoring in the a.m. followed by Bravelle (increased to 300 units) + Menopur (increased to 150 units) + Ganirelix (1 syringe)
By Friday, I was starting to look like a human pincushion. They were also having difficulty getting blood from me. My one arm vein was clearly pissed about all the abuse and decided to stop cooperating, which left my hands. On top of that, they had started to see a little fluid around my ovaries, so I'd been cautioned to decrease my fluid intake and eat more salty foods. Needless to say, the phlebotomists were not very happy with me.
All needles aside, I was definitely feeling uncomfortable. I had started to "notice" my ovaries sometime around Wednesday. According to my IVF Patient Information Packet, they swell up to the size of tennis balls during the stimulation process. Yikes! By the time Friday rolled around, I was feeling bloated and heavy, and wearing anything other than sweatpants seemed out of the question, so I worked from home again. It was also Mom's last day before she left. Depending on my Friday results, they thought I would either trigger that night for retrieval Sunday, or do one more night of stims and then trigger Saturday for retrieval Monday. Either way, it was obvious that Mom wasn't going to be there as hoped. This was something I had been trying not to freak out about too much, but the closer it got the more worried I became. Paul had already alerted the instructors for his classes that there was a chance he would need to be absent at least part of one of the days. All we could really do was wait...
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