Before and After

With a title like that, hopefully you didn't come here thinking you'd see some fabulous transformation of a dumpy back yard into a garden oasis. Or a scroungy looking antique chest into a lovely heirloom for my family to treasure. Or a mangy looking wretch into a beautiful Super Model. Nope, these are before and after shots of my stash of meds. If you're looking for that other stuff, you should try TL.C.com.

Here's the "before" picture. In case you don't know (and the blog title didn't give it away), I've got tired, worn out, dusty ol' ovaries that need some serious prodding with drugs to eek out just a few eggs.





Holy Lotta Drugs, eh? What's even scarier is that each of those boxes contain 5 vials of stuff (Bra.velle in the green boxes, Men.opur in the yellow boxes). I gleefully shot myself up with these little beauties for the past 11 days. To show for my efforts, I've got 6 decent follicles and a map of the milky way (fashioned from needle sticks) on my belly. Now, here on Trigger Day, this is what's left. The "after" picture*:




I considered saving all the old boxes and vials so that I could scatter them around in a picture to make it look like they had a huge party. One day I even had delusional visions of finding dollhouse-sized liquor bottles and making little paper lampshades to put on some of the vials just to drive the point home. Then I decided that perhaps I had officially Gone Around the Bend and didn't need to do any of those things after all, lest I immediately scare off the handful of folks that might actually read this blog (which will, most likely, just be a few of you from The Braces Bunch). I can hear it now . . . "Boy, that new chick is a real freakshow."

So today is, in fact, Trigger Day. I have 7 follicles, but only 6 of them are anywhere within range of being invited to the Petri Dish Party on Sunday. Since I've noticed many different ways to measure follicles, I won't bother posting the exact sizes. But suffice it to say that I am THRILLED to have this many follicles. Never, ever, ever have we gotten this many to play so nicely in the ovarian sandbox together.

My RE, bless his rich little heart, has managed to cook up a new protocol for every one of our 6 cycles. All of the IUIs ended up basically the same (1 giant follicle, 2 small ones), but the 3 IVF protocols have yielded increasing numbers of follicles each time. We had 3 the the first time (and thus converted to another useless IUI), 4 the second time, and now 6 (or 7 if you want to give extra credit to The Little Follie That Could who is trying desperately to catch up in the home stretch).

Of course this could all mean a big, fat nothing if we don't get any decent eggs on Sunday. Now the pre-retrieval questions have begun to whisper in my head...

Will I ovulate in the car on the way there? (Boy, would that suck)
Will we get any eggs?
Will they be mature?
Will Kevin's sample be good?
Will any fertilize?
Will any make it through the first night?
Will any make it to Day 3?
Will the embryos be of decent quality?
How many should we put back?
Will any of them stick?

This says nothing of the carnival that starts when I launch into the POAS frenzy. In the meantime, my biggest worry today is going to be what time they'll schedule my retrieval. Last cycle, it was at 1:30pm on a Wednesday. Not a big deal except that given the requirement of the exact 36 hour window between trigger and retrieval, that meant we had to set the alarm to wake up at 1:30am on Tuesday morning to jam a giant needle into my butt. Then, as if that wasn't exciting enough, we got to have some s.ex. Let me tell you that at that time of the night, it surely wasn't our best quality love.making. But to say that babymaking s.ex lost it's luster is a giant understatement and could perhaps be the topic of another post some other day.

So, for today, I am happy. I feel pretty good, my follies seem to be cooperating, and I've just painted on a fresh new coat of Hope. It's sure to lose it's lustre, get all scuffed up, and peel right off the wall during the 2WW, but today it looks nice.

* To be fair, there are some other things from the Before picture that are still around. For example, the PIO vials and antibiotics haven't been used yet. But, frankly, I was too lazy to drag all that other stuff out and arrange it. Plus, the stark image of the lone box is more entertaining, isn't it?