Week 3 - Egg Retrival

As week 3 started I was already a little disappointed because I thought this week would be all about egg retrieval and in my mind an end to the shot/vitamin regiment. I felt like I was sailing through my update appointments in Week 2 and my eggs where growing at a good rate.The  disappointment came on the Sunday at the end of Week 2 check up appointment, when i found out my eggs where not big enough yet for egg retrieval. Which meant more check up appointments and no definite date of when the egg retrieval will actually happen.

My 1st update appointment of week 3 was on Tuesday 2/21/17

• Blood work - 1 vial, My favorite nurse was back. Yippee
• Ultrasound-9 follicles previously I refereed to theses as eggs, but I learned that the follicle are like sacks that hold the eggs and normally there is one egg in each follicle. The size  of the follicles ranged from 4.5 to 13.5 millimeters. I was very disappointed at the end of this ultrasound because the largest follicle had only grown 0.5 mm since my appointment on Sunday.  I later learned  this could be due to having a different person preform the ultrasound or it could be  the machine itself measuring smaller than others ones in the office. On this particular morning, on the ride to and from the doctors office in Virginia, I was very emotional. I think it was the hormone shots starting to really affect me, I did shed some tears before and after.
• Clinical Staff Meeting- Added another check up appointment in 2 days, but no changes to my medication doses. The great thing that happen today was that the clinic had sample medicines they where able to  give me to get me through to my next appointment, which meant I did not have purchase additional medicine. That was a savings of over $1000. Even though I was very concerned about the lack of growth of my follicles from my previous visit, the staff said Dr. Robin was not. I was still worried and worse case scenarios where rolling through my head till my next appointment 2 days later.

When the doctors office adds an update appointment I get a call from their office later in the day once they have seen all the current IVF cycle patients and have had time create the schedule for those who are still needing to continue update appointments.  By week 3, I was obviously one of the last patients in the group that where still in the egg growing process and continuing the update appointments, because my appointments times kept getting earlier and earlier. Previous appointments where at 9 or 10 am, but my next scheduled appointment on Thursday was for 7am. I have to admit that I had a small heart attack when the lady on the phone told me 7am and later called back to make sure I had heard her correctly. I am not a morning person and the clinic is about 1 1/2 hours away from my home. That meant getting up at 4:30 am to leave home by 5:15 to be there on time. I tried to stay positive about the early appointment thinking that at least I would be able to get to work and not have to use my sick time, but that did not happen even with the early appointments I was still using 2 hours of sick time vs 4 hours for later appointment times.


Thursday 2/23/17 Update Appointment 7am

• Ultrasound - Due to the appointment being before 8 am and the ultrasound tech needing to go to the surgical side for others who where doing egg retrieval they switched the order of the appointment. 
• I lost track of the actual number of follicles it was either 9 or 10 but they ranged in size between 8-15 millimeters. This made me happy as I could see them getting close to the 16 mm size needed for egg retrieval.
• Blood work - Labcorp who runs the blood work lab does not arrive till 8am, so the clinical staff  draws blood for patients who have appointments before 8. I think I mention in last week blog how I don't have the greatest veins. The Labcorp nurse Patricia says my veins are deep and are not morning veins. Unfortunately, Patricia had not arrived yet when it was time to draw my blood and the clinical nurse stuck me twice before giving up and went to find another clinical nurse to draw blood. As soon as the next clinical nurse came in to begin looking for a good vein Patricia walked in and took over, but even Patricia struggled this morning and had to stick me 2 more times. I am bruising from the blood being drawn so much. My husband was joking around with me saying people are going to think I am a crack addict and that I needed to wear long sleeves. lol The things I have done in this IVF process.I just can't seem to bring myself to post a picture of the terrible bruising going on in my stomach area where I have been administering the shots every days.

• Clinical Staff Meeting-Added another update appointment to my schedule for Friday and had me to continues on the same medicine schedule of 20 vitamins/pills a day and 5 shots a day. Again the doctors office was nice enough to provide me with a few samples so I did not have to reorder medicine. 

Friday 2/24/17 Update Appointment 6:40 am

• Ultrasound - This was the first time I had follicles in range. I knew I was close to Egg Retrieval now.
•  3 follicles where 16 - 18 mm (egg retrieval size) and 5 follicles where 4-13 mm
• Blood work - Again my appointment was before 8 am so the labcorp nurse was not in yet, but Erica who is a Clinical Nurse did a great job only having to stick me one time for the blood work part of the visit. I was able to tell her exactly what Patricia with Labcorp does and Erica was so patient and took her time to make sure she was able to get it right the first time.
• Clinical Staff Meeting- They announced I was scheduled for Egg Retrieval on Sunday 2/26/17 at 6:30 am and provided me with a HCG and Oocyte Retrieval instructions sheet spelling out what I needed to do to prepare for Egg Retrieval on Sunday. They went over how mix and administer the trigger shot and what I could and could not consume for the liquid diet.

HCG & Oocyte (Egg) Retrieval Process - To prepare for Egg  Retrieval the process took 2 days. 

• Friday - 
• Took my last 2 doses of Micro Luperon Shots- These are the shots that had to be taken at 7:05 am and 7:05 pm. I was so happy to finish this up, because I felt like my life revolved around theses times.
• Took my last Follistim shot. I was only required to take the am shot and was taken off the PM Menopur Shot
• Since I had spent weeks taking Micro Lupreon to stop ovulation, I now needed to take a shot to trigger ovulation. This shot was called Pregnyl  and had to be taken exactly at 8:45 pm in upper right side of my butt. The clinical nurse actually drew a circle on my butt while in the office earlier in the day, so I made sure to inject it in the right location. All other shots I was injecting into my stomach with this being a new location that was harder to access I asked my husband to pull the trigger and inject the shot. I think he enjoyed that fact that he got to give me a shot, for me the anticipation of someone else doing it was worse than if I just did it myself. 

 

• Saturday -
• Well here the weird part of Saturday is, I had to take a pregnancy test and call into the doctors office by 12pm to verify that I got a positive pregnancy test. That pretty weird to see your pregnant on a test when you know your not. 

• Took all morning and any time (16 pills) vitamins/pills but not evening pills (4 pills). 
•  At 1pm I began a bowel prep series of medicine taking 2 pills every 15 minutes for 2 hours and then had to continue with a liquid diet till midnight. I slept very little Saturday night waiting for the bowel prep medicine to begin. I was so concerned when I showed up to the doctors office on Sunday with out having a single bowel movement, however they where not concerned and said that it does not always work with patients. The reason patients are put on a liquid diet and bowel cleanse is because your bowels can wrap around your ovaries and hide your follicles. If you are cleaned out they will be able to see all the possible follicle and not miss any eggs that could be hiding. 

 

• Last step was to stop all liquids even water at midnight. 

Egg Retrieval Day 2/26/17

• My husband and I arrived at the New Hope Center at 6:15 am.
•  A little after 6:30 I was called back to the pre/post op room. I was given a hospital gown and asked to remove all my clothes and put on the gown. I was placed in a room with 6 big reclining chairs, where the nurse Virginia prepared me for the egg retrieval procedure. She inserted an IV in my hand and gave me some medicines for the procedure. The nurse was very nice and being we where the only 2 in the big room we spend lots of time just chatting about HGTV which I was watching and life. The anesthesiologist came in and went over the process of putting me to sleep and then the embryologist came in to verify what the plan was for my eggs. The plan is to do a procedure called ICSI and testing called PGS. I will go into alot more detail in next week's blog as it will take some explaining and this weeks blog is getting very long. 
• Virginia then took me to the procedure room via a wheel chair where there was the clinical staff, anesthesiologist, and ultrasound tech. They had me lay down on a table and strapped my legs into these stir ups very similar to a women going to her annual exam but the stir ups literally where strapped up to my calves. EKG monitors where applied and the staff was working feverishly setting everything up. That the last thing I remember before waking up and the procedure being over. Virginia was still there with me unhooking the monitors while everyone else was leaving moving on to the next patient. My first question was how many eggs did she get. They said they where able to retrieve 5 eggs. Don my husband said Dr. Robin came out and spoke with him after the procedure and acted like she was happy with being able to retrieve 5 eggs and also removed a poly op from the Hysteroscopy part of the procedure.
• I was then taking back to post op room via a wheel chair. Where my blood pressure and pulse was monitored for about an hour. I  was put back in the those big reclining chairs where I enjoyed a nice warm blanket, watched some HGTV and may of took a little nap.  I saw Dr. Robin walk through the pre/post op room twice and each time she said we got 5 eggs and  one time stop for a second to hug me.I had to ask after I saw her, does she ever slow down. They said no. Every time I see Dr. Robin walking around the clinic she is walking at a speedy pace. Even when you talk with her you can tell she works fact pace all the time. In talking with Skeeter the ultra sound tech earlier she said the earliest she ever come in for egg retrieval is 3 am and she mention that every month she works 3 weeks straight during the IVF cycle. I am always amazed at the hours the New Hope staff puts in. It is truly amazing that the amount of time they make themselves available (7 days a week 6am to 6pm). Now that I had finished my post procedure monitoring I was asked to verify that I could urinate and then was allowed to get dress and was walked back to my husband to be able to leave. The whole process from arrival to leaving took about 3 hours. 
• Sometime during the time I was taken back for the egg retrieval my husband was taken to another part of the clinic to produce a specimen for the embryologist department to be able to mix with the eggs they retrieved from me.

Week 3 turned out to be the busiest week yet. Next week is all about our embryos and how they fertilize. If everything goes right and we have viable embryos then they would be implanted at the end of March. We still have along way to go, but we have finished a big part of the IVF process.