IVF Update #9

The waiting game has ended!

I have done a lot of resting and recouping this week. I knew I’d hurt, but I didn’t know I would hurt this much and for this long. Not going to lie – I have been going stir crazy stuck in the house, but every time I try to go somewhere my body reminds me that I hurt and I don’t have the energy, so I need to chill out. Thankfully, every day I feel better and I will be 100% soon.

The doctors called on Monday night to let us know that out of the 31 eggs retrieved 27 of them were able to get fertilized. AWESOME!! We were very excited about that news.

Day 3 (Wednesday) after the egg retrieval the doctors check the embryos to see how they are growing and give them a score of poor, fair, good, or excellent. All 27 of the embryos survived and got ratings between fair and good.

On day 5 (Friday) the embryos are checked again. If they have grown into blastocysts, meaning that the embryo has matured and the cells are getting too big and they being to hatch out of its outer shell, then they can be frozen or transferred (aka- implanted back into the women’s uterus). If an embryo isn’t matured enough on day 5 to freeze, the embryologist will grow them to day 6. If the embryo grows well enough it will be frozen, if not, it will be discarded.

In our case we will be freezing all of them that we can. When we are able to, according to my body, we will thaw some embryos out and transfer them back into me. The earliest we would be able to do this is near the end of July. All the other frozen embryos will stay frozen until we decide to try again. So most likely I will never have to do the egg retrieval part of IVF again! Yay! That is happy news to us because we feel like the retrieval is the roughest part.

Our nurse called us Friday afternoon and told us that 12 embryos were able to be frozen! That is good news to hear! She also told us that they will keep growing the rest of the embryos and see if any more can get frozen on day 6.

Saturday morning we got a call saying that they were able to freeze 4 more embryos. 16 total frozen embryos! That is great news (okay, okay I do wish that we were able to freeze all 27 of the embryos, but we can be happy with this). Also, all but one of them were Grade A or B. Last year the two embryos that we put in me were only Grade C. So this time we’ve got good, strong embryos.

Daniel and I want to do a frozen transfer as soon as we can. We will start doing ultrasounds and blood work around the 4^th of July. I am already on meds, but will be adding a few more as the month progresses. Then we will plan on a transfer for late July.

We will still occasionally do updates, but there really won’t be too much to tell until we are ready to transfer. Thank you again for your love! We are amazed at the money you raised for us; what a huge blessing! Thank you!

IVF Update #8

There is good news and bad news.

The good news is that we were able to retrieve 31 eggs yesterday! That’s got to be a record amount!

The bad news is that I did get hyperstimulated and I won’t be able to do a fresh egg transfer; I will have to wait 4 weeks and do a frozen transfer. And I am in an incredible amount of pain.

Other bad news is that Daniel’s sperm wasn’t good quality yesterday (which is a shocker because usually the doctors are floored at how healthy his sperm is).  Because of this the doctor called us yesterday and said they would have to do ICSI. Intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is where the embryologist selects a single sperm to be injected directly into an egg, instead of fertilization taking place in a dish where many sperm are placed near an egg.

Now we wait to hear from the doctor today to see how many eggs got fertilized. I’ve got my fingers crossed for all 31!

Here are the details of yesterday’s events:

We drove to the doctor’s office at 7:30AM Sunday morning. They immediately started getting us ready for surgery. I made sure to tell the anesthesiologist that I am sensitive to anesthesia and it makes me sick. He said that they would add some anti-nausea medicine in my IV to help with that.

Then they whisked Daniel away to collect his sperm and I went into the surgery room. There were 5 nurses/doctors around me, and I’m just lying there nervous as heck, in my hospital gown and blue booties and blue hair net. I’ve got one nurse strapping my feet into the stirrups. One nurse is arranging blankets across my lap and legs since I am now exposing myself to the cold air because of my legs being spread open by being strapped into the stirrups. Then I’ve got one doctor putting in my IV for anesthesia. Another doctor sticking heart monitors on my chest. A nurse is covering my mouth with an oxygen mask. I’m lying there watching all of them doing a hundred different things, them telling me to just relax (as if!), and then I’m out.

The next thing I remember is being in the recovery room with Daniel sitting next to me holding my hand.

Everyone comes out of anesthesia different I’ve realized. A few years ago when Daniel had a surgery he was extremely polite when he was waking up from being put under. He kept telling the nurse “thank you” after everything she said or did. It was pretty cute. But me – I’m just an idiot who is clueless to what is going on. I just wanted to go back to sleep, but all these nurses kept coming in and asking me questions. I couldn’t get myself to just wake up. My left eye wouldn’t stay open because I was so tired. I don’t really remember this, but Daniel said that when the nurses and doctors came to talk to me I would hold open my left eye with my hand. Hahaha! He said I looked super creepy and weird.  

Then I got the shakes really bad; like my whole body was shaking. They asked me if I was cold and I said no (which I also don’t really remember). But I was shivering so hard that they couldn’t ignore it no matter what I said. The nurse brought in this awesome machine that is a heater with a long tube and you just put it into bed with you and it blows the perfect temperature of heat. It was awesome and I totally want to own one! I would tell Daniel to move it from one side of the bed to the other and I eventually stopped shivering.

Our doctor stopped by to tell us that he was able to retrieve 31 eggs. He also said that my left ovary was hiding my right ovary (mine like to crowd each other out, which make it difficult to see both. It happened last year with IVF and occasionally it will make my ultrasounds difficult as well).  He said that because it was difficult to get to he had to poke through my vaginal wall multiple times to be able to get to all of the follicles. He said to expect a lot of pain because of that.

Also, since I had so many follicles and they were hard to get to the surgery took 3 times as long as normal. It typically is a half hour procedure, but it took me over 1 ½ hours. Daniel told me that the anesthesiologist had to run out to get more medicine because instead of the normal 2 vials I had to use 5. That could have something to do with why I was having a hard time coming out of it. I didn’t puke though! So props to the anesthesiologist for that!

After I was able to get up and get dressed, they gave us some prescriptions and sent us home. They warned me that I would be in a lot of pain and told me to get lots of fluids and bed rest. On the drive home the doctor called and told Daniel about his sperm and them having to do ICSI. I really hope that is works out and that we will have lots of embryos to freeze.

They weren’t kidding when they said I’d have a lot of pain. It feels like my abdomen and pelvis got hit by a train. The medicine makes me dizzy and drowsy. I have major pain; I am so bloated that I looked like I could be 5 months pregnant. You quickly realize how much you use your core for every movement. Even a hiccup or fart hurts, and sitting up on your own in practically an impossible act.

Luckily I have an amazing husband who spent the day helping me out. He would help me sit up, fix my pillows, warm up a rice bag, and get me medicine and water. He even passed on going to his brother’s house to watch NBA finals, just in case I needed some help. And, because I was the most comfortable in our recliner chair in the basement I decided to sleep in it for the night and Daniel slept on the couch next to me. He is seriously the sweetest.

Today I continue to rest. I do feel better compared to yesterday, but I am still feeling in pretty rough shape. At some point the doctor should be calling us to tell us how many eggs they were able to fertilize. So fingers crossed that all of them did!

We are bummed that we don’t get to do a fresh transfer. You get yourself mentally prepared for it because that has been the plan the whole time. It was going to be nice having it all done at once and have the rest of the summer to play. But we will do what the doctor says. Since I was getting hyperstimulated I had to take a different “trigger” shot than originally planned so that I didn’t go into severe hyperstimulation and have to be hospitalized. This shot makes it hard for your body to carry a pregnancy. Also, being hyperstimulated isn’t a good environment to carry a pregnancy. So we will let my body rest and hope that we can freeze some embryos to transplant later.

Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers! Keep them coming because we still need them!

Sorry for the incredibly long post! Also, sorry if there are any errors; I’m going to blame it on me being tired and drugged. 

IVF Update #7

It’s been a week full of doctor appointments. We had one on Monday, Thursday, Friday, and will also be going Saturday and Sunday.

Yes, we are that high-maintenance that they have to do ultrasounds and blood work every day. The doctor has been a little worried as he monitored me because I have so, so, so many follicles and am now in high risk for hyper-stimulation. Also, in the past two days my estrogen level has increased exponentially. This all happened last year, so we weren’t real surprised, but it is good to keep an eye on because we don’t want to screw anything up.

There is some physical pain associated with all of this too. I’ve got my bruised and tender belly, and on Wednesday I started having abdominal pain. After the ultrasound on Thursday we are guessing the pain is from how big and heavy my ovaries are from all of the follicles on them. It hasn’t been so fun. Doing ultrasounds every day adds to the ovary pain too.

But the good news is that we will be doing EGG RETRIEVAL ON SUNDAY (way to bury the lead, right?). We took our “trigger” shot tonight and we will retrieve first thing Sunday morning. It’ll be a good Father’s Day if we can make some babies - even if it isn’t the fun way.  ;)

It is still amazing to me that any of this is even possible. Modern medicine is really a miracle!

Keep us in your prayers! We want everything to go smoothly: lots of eggs retrieved, all of them able to get fertilized, and then do lots of healthy growing. And it’d be nice if I didn’t get sick from the anesthesia, but that would be a first. We will keep you updated on how things go on Sunday.  

IVF Update #6

Just wanted to do a quick update for everyone. We’ve done 2 doctor visits, but we still need more injections and time.

On Saturday morning we went to the doctor. We had blood work and an ultrasound done. During this ultrasound (all of my ultrasounds are trans-vaginal, aka the ultrasound wand goes inside of me) the doctor is looking to see how big my follicles are. Follicles hold the eggs and when they mature they will burst and release the egg (ovulation). With IVF they want the follicles to mature, but not burst, because they want to harvest the eggs manually. They can control this by one of the injections I’m taking.

Since I have PCOS (poly cystic ovarian syndrome) I have lots and lots of follicles all the time. So on Saturday when the doctor checked I had about 30 follicles on each ovary (a “normal” female will have about 5 on each), but the follicles weren’t maturing very fast. This is no big surprise to us because this was the case every single time we did injections last year. We usually take the medicine twice as long as others going through IVF. My biggest follicle measured at a 7mm. To do egg retrieval the doctor wants the follicles at 19mm.

After the doctor appointment on Saturday the doctor gave me one more injection to take every night. This shot is brutal. It stings like crazy going in, then for the next two hours it is a big lump in my stomach, red all over, and itchy/stingy. Then when I wake up in the morning it is tender and bruised. Not so fun. When I took it Sunday night I injected it even slower and I applied an ice pack to the injection sight. This helped it not bruise, so that is good.

Went to the doctor again this morning; they like to monitor closely so that we don’t miss our window of opportunity. Not much has changed. The follicles are slowly getting bigger. Had one or two measuring at 11mm and a few more were in the 7-8mm range. So I’ll take my 3 injections every night and go back to the doctor on Thursday to see how things are moving along.

I know that we have been thanking everyone for your donation, but we want you to see exactly why it is such a HUGE help to us. This picture is of the injections that I take every night – the cost of just one day’s dosage is $325 (that is including a 50% discount that we qualified for. Normally it would be $650 per day! We didn’t know about the discount last year, so we were paying full price for six months). Thank you all again for helping us in this round of IVF!

IVF Update #5

This week we started our injections. It is a different medicine than we took last year, and it is kind of nice because I don’t have to take as much of this new stuff. For now it is two shots in the stomach every night – and still taking my daily cocktail of pills. We will do injections for about a week, and then do bloodwork and an ultrasound to see where we are at.

Daniel and I were talking about how it is going a lot better this time compared to last year. If you think about it though, you would say “of course it is!” Last year I was literally giving myself shots for 6 months!!

Injections for 6 months! No wonder we spent so much money and were physically and emotionally spent as well! And to think that people would still tell us that there was more we could be doing and that “it’s totally worth it” – as if they even had any clue what it was like to experience infertility.

Obviously we didn’t take injections that long just for one round of IVF. We had our first consultation with the doctor in Jan. 2015. We decided to try doing IUI (insemination). So in Feb. we tried for our first IUI attempt. The injections were too weak to get me to mature my eggs, so the doctor had us take them for another week. It still wasn’t working and so they decided to cancel the cycle, give my body a rest and try again in two weeks.

That is the hard thing about infertility medicine; there isn’t one answer. It is different for every patient, and the same patient can react differently at different times. We tried a 2^nd IUI, but it didn’t happen as well, this time because I had too many eggs. After that we tried a 3^rd time, starting it as an IUI, but expecting the possibility of it becoming IVF depending on how my body responded. Man, oh man, did my body respond! We were getting ready to drive down to Salt Lake to do IVF because we had too many follicles to continue with the IUI. Just before we were getting ready to leave, the doctor called and said “We just reviewed your ultrasound from today and you are so overstimulated (aka – lots and lots of follicles) that we are extremely worried that you will get hyperstimulated. Take this shot to cancel your cycle, and watch for symptoms of hyperstimulation.” Yeah, those symptoms: 5-10lb weight gain in one day, sever nausea and diarrhea, shortness of breath, abdominal pain, kidney failure, twisted ovary, internal bleeding and you can die from it. I was totally freaked out!!! I was acutely aware of every pain I felt. I’d wake up at night thinking that I had twisted my ovary from moving around in my sleep. To sum it up I was a train wreck. Luckily though it was all just pains and nothing serious.

We were either brave or dumb because after all of that, the very next month, we said, “Let’s try IVF again!” That was in July of 2015. The doctors had the injections dialed in a little better this time around. We successfully made it to the egg retrieval, got 11 eggs. 8 of those were fertilized; 5 of which were growing correctly. Had 2 implanted, and the rest weren’t viable for freezing. I miscarried the 2 that were implanted and we decided to take some time off to recover.

So, as you can tell from that whole saga, we are liking doing this one month thing much better than our 6 months of ups and downs last year. I can handle the stinging of the shots and the tender belly afterwards since it is just for this month.  

Thank you again for helping us to try to make a family. Not stressing as much about the financial part is a huge relief. Thank you so much!

IVF Update #4

One step closer!

Friday afternoon we had our bloodwork and ultrasound appointment. I have done so many of these over the years that it is just routine now. I have scar tissue on my arms from the countless needles drawing blood to test hormone levels or to run other tests on. The ultrasound techs and I are on a first name basis. It’ll be weird when I actually get pregnant and get to do normal belly ultrasounds instead of these vaginal ones that I’m accustomed to.

Our appointment was at the end of the work day, so our nurse didn’t call until 6PM with our results. She said that my uterus lining was thicker than normal (normal for everyone else) and she wanted to ask the doctor if I should hold off on the medicine that I was supposed to start taking that night. I told her that last time we did IVF that my lining was thick as well, so it really isn’t that abnormal for me. She looked back at my chart from last year and saw that it was 17mm thick last year, and this time it is 10mm and I’m still menstruating so it will most likely get thinner still. My bloodwork results weren’t back yet, so the nurse said she or the doctor would call me late tonight to let me know if I should go ahead with starting the medicine.

6 hours later…at almost midnight, I finally hear back from the nurse! At 10:30PM – 11PM I had texted and emailed the nurse asking if she found out if I should be starting the medicine because I kind of needed to know, soon. We were staying awake waiting to hear back. Those of you who know us, we are not night owls and we were tired from a long week, so we really just wanted to go to bed! Finally the nurse called, she was super apologetic and sweet (so of course we weren’t upset with her). She said go ahead and start the medicine and we will plan on starting injections next week.  Last night I took my new medicine; 12 pills, which added to my usual 20 pills made a grand totally of 32 pills in one day! Oh, I’m so glad that 10 of those pills were just a one time thing and I’m really only adding 2 more pills to my daily dose.

This week was our last week of school. It was also the week that Daniel’s family takes the cows out on the forest for summer grazing. So every day this week, as soon as we got home from work, we would change into our dirty clothes and help sort and move cows. It makes for a long day waking up at 5:30AM to go to work and then not coming home again until about 10:30PM. But now summer is here, and we get to relax and focus on doing IVF.

I know we say it every time, but THANK YOU! Thank you so much! We will never be able to adequately express how much help you have given us. You are amazing and wonderful people and we love you very much!

Working with cows

Last day of school - lots of good memories