Lucky 18

The retrieval was Monday, and everything must have gone well because they extracted 25 eggs, 9 of them were normally fertilized with standard IVF procedures (when they let the sperm find the egg on their own) and 9 via ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection). Those 18 embryos are “cooking” in the lab right now. Amazing! The transfer should be on Saturday or Sunday. I will have to call the voicemail assigned to me by the clinic on Friday to find out when exactly it will happen. I suppose the odds are good that we will have at least one high quality embryo to transfer and a bunch that are acceptable for freezing. I do need to make sure that they know we only intend to transfer one embryo this weekend. They told me the doctor will do whatever you asked him to do at your initial meeting, but that was several months ago. We’ve only seen him once since then. I do not want to waste any of the embryos (especially the high quality ones).

I stopped taking lupron on Sunday, the day before the retrieval. We started the progesterone in oil shots on Monday. The nurse at the clinic showed my husband and me how to administer them when he came in to give his semen Monday. It’s a much bigger needle than the lupron shots, but it really doesn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought. If you are curious, just search for “progesterone in oil injection” on You Tube. I also started taking progesterone vaginally today (Wednesday) and an antibiotic.

We are super excited to get to the transfer. I’m still concerned about getting out of work. I’m just going to have to call in once I know when it is actually going to happen. I have this whole week off to get stuff done before the transfer. I wanted to spend it cleaning and making food to eat so I didn’t have to worry about that post-transfer, but I spent all day doing work instead. I need to learn to let that stuff go.