A Tale of Two Cycles

Egg Retrieval #2...complete!  We arrived at the clinic (which, by the way is 40 miles from our house...I will not miss that drive!) at 7:15 am and by 8:00 am, my IV was in and I was walking into the procedure room.   No waiting around for hours like the first cycle.  By 8:35 am, I was waking up groggily in the recovery room 

And now...the stats.  At my last monitoring appointment, they saw about a dozen follicles on each ovary.  However, today they managed to retrieve 34 MATURE follicles.   The embryo tech seemed very surprised that I had so many that were mature...apparently, that's sort of unusual (read: rockstar ovaries.  I've refrained from talking about my rockstar ovaries this time around as that sort of backfired during IVF#1, but apparently...my ovaries...they cannot be stopped! Behold the power of my ovaries!)

As you'll recall in our first cycle, I had a lot of follicles (18 on one ovary and 17 on the other before the retrieval), but they were only able to retrieve 16 and many of those were poor quality.   So for us to get that many mature follicles...well, we're pretty happy.  All 34 were fertilized and now we wait to find out which ones progress.   Cross your fingers and toes for lots of good quality embryos!  At this point, we'd be delighted to get pregnant this cycle but we'll be even more delighted to have plenty of good embryos.

If we don't get pregnant during this 'fresh' IVF cycle, we'll do a frozen transfer  subsequently, which is much less invasive and less expensive.  This time around, we bought a package of IVF treatments and there was no cost difference between one fresh cycle vs. one fresh and one frozen cycle, so it's nice to know that if we didn't get pregnant, we have a frozen cycle as a back-up. 

The downside of all those eggs being retrieved is that I'm a lot more uncomfortable this time around.  The pain meds aren't cutting it...I'm hoping I feel better tomorrow since I'll be back at work.  Lots of budget work to do. :(

Nick, as usual, was an excellent nurse, despite the fact he wouldn't heed my demand for a bell.  What good is being waited on hand and foot IF YOU DON'T HAVE A BELL?  Harumph.  Luckily, Ernie the newest feline addition to our house, acquiesced to some cuddling.

More to come tomorrow!