It's Not Awful News!

Overall, this cycle has been very low-stress, except for the clinic commute. I wasn't oversuppressed on BCPs, so things moved fairly fast. There were very few medications to order, and they cost under a hundred dollars. No need for five or six FedEx orders per cycle like last time, when I was so anxious about making sure that I had all the necessary meds on time, without wasting a single precious, insanely expensive drop.

Best of all, there was no breathless rollercoaster ride, no wondering if (despite all the meds) I would end up with two eggs, or four, or none at all. There was the daily grind of the commute, but it was a mindless, emotionally neutral sort of grind. One day at a time. Breathe in, breathe out.

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The most "interesting" moment came the night I did the trigger. (Although I used no ovary-stimulating drugs, a trigger shot was required for precise timing of ovulation and egg retrieval.) If you're squeamish, this would be a good time to skip down toward the bottom of this post!

I've done a few intramuscular shots before, and while the needles are, um, impressive, they're also very sharp, which is a good thing.Truly, most of the time, there's been no pain at all. There's just that instinctive resistance to doing something your body KNOWS is wrong (stabbing itself) even when your mind says, No problem, it's cool. I imagine that skydivers have to overcome the same instinct when they jump out of airplanes.

Anyway, everything went according to plan. I drew the target, hit the bullseye, pulled back on the plunger, saw no blood, and injected. Then I pulled out the needle and ... instantly, blood poured down my backside. What the...?? There was so much that it ruined my bathroom rug (which was ugly, so no big loss) and ruined my pajamas (which I'd made myself, so grrrrr). I clamped a paper towel over my behind and tried to clean up the mess with one free hand. Bear in mind that it was now after 11 PM, because that was the precise time I was told to do the deed.

The blood didn't stop. I saw more droplets pattering on the floor and realized that the paper towel was now saturated. Not good. Suddenly I felt a little light-headed and queasy. Maybe I'd had my blood drawn too many times in recent months. My blood pressure is always low, so it doesn't take much to make me feel light-headed. I decided that the cleanup could wait and lay down until the feeling passed.

My biggest fear was that this weird occurrence (which I still can't explain) might affect the outcome by letting some of the medication leak out, or whatever. So the next morning I took a home pregnancy test. They measure hCG, which is the same hormone in the trigger shot. A positive test result would mean that I didn't totally screw up the shot. And sure enough, my pregnancy test turned up a strong positive, which (fake though it was) was lots of fun.

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Then came the egg retrieval. That was interesting, too. Because this type of IVF retrieves just the one egg that the body normally produces on its own each month, they gave me just a form of "twilight" sedation. In other words, I felt that shit. Feeling someone muck around in your ovaries with a needle isn't great. On the other hand, full anesthesia adds more cost (and risk), which I could do without.

The room had a painting on the ceiling. I guess it was meant to give the person on the table a more distracting, calming focus than a sea of blank ceiling tiles. This painting showed a street with people strolling and French flags hanging from balconies. As the nurse slipped the medication into my IV, she joked, "Are those flags waving now?" I laughed, despite the fact that I was trussed up in knee stirrups (What do you call those things?) and splayed out on the table like a Thanksgiving turkey. "Are the people on the street speaking French now?"

I felt light-headed and spacey, a little more relaxed than I had been, but fully awake. Then came the speculum and needle. It wasn't awful, but it was worse than my first no-stim IVF retrieval. That time, just when my toes were starting to curl and I was starting to think, "Well, this sucks," it was over. This time it went on longer (still probably <30 seconds), because the doctor saw two mature-looking follicles on the ultrasound and cleaned them both out. "Usually, the body picks a dominant follicle and the other egg withers, but you never know..." he explained. As it turned out, there was only one egg. I'm glad he tried both follicles, though. Wouldn't that have been a super-mega bonus prize to get TWO eggs naturally!

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The next day, I was out of cell range for a while. When I checked voicemail, there it was: my clinic calling with the fertilization report. I punched in my code, shaking, having flashbacks to that last awful time. But this time it wasn't awful. Oh my God, it WASN'T AWFUL! It was good news! I sat down on the ground in shock—GOOD shock!

Whatever happens now, I feel validated that my choice to return to this clinic was the right one. We've already gotten farther than with last month's "throw the book at it" medicated IVF.