Egg Retrieval

The day was finally here!! We got all of our paperwork on Saturday with our instructions to take the trigger shot at 8pm on Saturday evening. All of the waiting for this is finally over! I couldn't believe it! The past 15 months of waiting were finally coming to an end!

I wish I could have posted about it yesterday, but I was really tired from the egg retrieval and all I wanted to do was lay on the couch, drink my water, and sleep!

We woke up at 6:30am to get to the fertility center by 7:30am, but of course, we had to take some picture before leaving!

Once we got to the center, they took us to a pre-op room where I got to change into my lovely outfit. 

We hung out in this room where they put my IV in and gave me my loopy medicine. Oh boy was that fun! When I was 10 I had my tonsils out and had a reverse reaction to the medicine vercid. It's supposed to relax you, but for me, it made me very anxious and I cried and cried. So I told the anesthesiologist about this and his response was, "well do you want to try it?" Well why not? Let's just see what happens. It took about 2 minutes and all of the sudden things were starting to spin. I was actually in the middle of a conversation with Dr. Ku and all of the sudden I said, "ok, this conversation is over because you are spinning." Ha! He told me we could continue our conversation later.

I don't remember much after that. I do remember not seeing Kyle before they took me back, but he reassured me that he saw me before they took me back. I remember talking to Dr. Ku and the anesthesiologist in the operating room about being a teacher and then I remember waking up in my pre-op room. They had a sprite and goldfish for me to eat. It tasted so good since I hadn't eaten anything all morning. And yes, this was right after I came out, I look alittle loopy :)

They told us they got 38 eggs! THIRTY EIGHT! We can't believe how many there were. Actually I can, because my poor belly was so bloated! I've gained 6 pounds since starting the stim shots last week. Getting on that scale was a mistake!

They did warn us about OHSS (Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome). It can happen when lots of eggs are produced and your estrogen is elevated and mine was the entire time through my stim shots. They started me at 225 for my follistim shots and they lowered them drastically every time I came in for blood work. Joan, my nurse, kept telling me slow down, slow down! What can I say? My body reacts to medicine very well!

Unfortunately if OHSS occurs, they'll have to cancel the transfer of the embryos until my body is back to normal. So far I haven't had any symptoms of OHSS. They include severe cramping, vomiting, bloating of the stomach (as big as a women who's 20 weeks pregnant, ouch!), not needing to pee, etc. I did start vomiting yesterday, but it was from the pain meds I took. I'm very sore in my abdomen area and I can't wait for the bloating to subside along with the weight gain.

I heard from the doctor today and from the 38 eggs that were taken, 31 of them were mature enough to inject. So today when they checked on the embryos, 25 of them had fertilized. 25!!! That is such a good number! They will leave the embryos alone until Thursday and then check again and give us a call. Then again on Saturday, they'll check 1 last time to see how many are ready to implanted. From that group we will choose how many we will implant and do the transfer on Saturday. We will freeze the rest to use later.

I can't believe it's finally here! The waiting is over. We could be a momma and a daddy in a little over 2 weeks!