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!