Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The UGLY truth of IVF


If anyone out there is thinking “How bad can it be, its just a few injections” or thinking how much fun it would be to take several injections a day and pump mega doses of whatever into your body - I am posting this for you. Not that I really think anyone out there thinks that it would be fun, but I don’t think anyone can actually understand how it really is. Just like a person who has never given birth can understand how painful it is, or how a person without children can understand the strong bond and emotion that comes after the child is born - or a person who is not wanting anyone in the room while delivering cuz of vanity or embarrassment could understand you wont give a sh*t if a high school marching band comes in just as long as they get the baby OUT! I’m sure you get my point. The injections are not bad, I don’t even feel them, however, the bruises are another story. There are hard lumps in the middle of the bruises and, of course, for whatever reason I chose to inject right where my waistband sits so I am reminded of the tenderness all day as my pants dig into the bruises (and bloating). Crazy that as a child they would have to call in nurses to hold me down to get vaccines.

Went in today and found out natural killer cells are at 14. They like to see them under 13 - of course they do! So now we chose if we want to drop 5k on the treatment or take our chances since the numbers are so close to “normal”..... it couldn’t be way over or way under, right? Nothing is ever easy in this game. My thoughts right now are to go ahead with the treatment and cover all bases, just so I cant come back and say we should have done it if this doesn’t turn out well. I do, however, have a call into the specialist so we can get her opinion on all of this. Since her office doesn’t really get much money from the treatment I can assume I can trust she will not tell me to do it for her own financial gain.

u/s went well - still 9 follies with one leading that is pretty big so we will prob lose (from being over mature) that one to get the others, which is fine. By the end of all this each of my ovaries will be almost the size of baseballs I assume which will make putting on pants pretty darn difficult.
I was actually able to remember to ask why they cut my meds in half on Monday and she said that after 3 days of meds my E2 (estrogen) level was at 500 and that was way higher than they wanted so hopefully today is more in the range of where they want it to be.
I'm really hoping for a weekend retrieval - Sunday would be great but I’m not holding my breath. I am thinking more on the lines of Tuesday - I’d love the weekend one so no extra time off of work but whatcha gonna do? My follies don’t seem to grow on my work-week schedule so I do what they want.

2 comments:

Miss Megan said...

HA! Mine follies don't grow on a work week schedule either. Wouldn't that be nice!
And with the Ivig - I'm interested to see with the specialist says, otherwise I would be inclined to follow your lead. It's better to cover all the bases after all.
And yeah, nice bruises there chica. Definitely sexy scars of infertility=). Thanks for sharing!

Anonymous said...

Why do you inject so low? There's not much subcutaneous fat that low in your abdomen...it's all around your belly button, where you're supposed to inject.