I’ve been meaning to write this post for weeks but better late than never huh.
During the writing of my last post I was about 2 weeks into IVF treatment. I decided to subject myself to this crappy process (read: needles every day and mood swings every other day) in order to put some embryos aside in case the upcoming chemo wrecks my fertility.
From the 6th September until 29th September I had to inject myself every morning with a hormone called buserelin. Then from the 30th September until the 6th October I had to have the buserelin every morning, and then a Gonal-F injection every evening. Great fun. It didn’t stop me going up north for 10 days though for my sister in law’s hens’ weekend and fabulous wedding. Pissed me off though that I had to leave the wedding earlier than I would have liked just to go home and stab myself yet another time. All for a good cause everyone kept reminding me.
Interspersed with the daily injections were pelvic scans and blood tests. Ugh. I was pleased to hear during the last scan that the collection of follicles in each ovary looked like ‘a lovely bunch of grapes’. Can we make some wine please? That sounds much nicer than what I’m currently doing.
They scheduled the ‘pick up’ (i.e. when they steal my eggs out – now I know how my chickens feel when I take theirs every day) for 10.45am on Monday 11th. In order to release the eggs, you have to give yourself a ‘trigger’ injection exactly 12 hours before harvest time (harvesting my crops just like Farmville, as my lovely friend Bex pointed out via Twitter) . Hence at 10.45pm on Saturday night, at my friends house party, I announced to everyone that I was off to inject myself for the last time. Hoorah! It was a great feeling to be almost done with it.
Monday morning came and we were nervously waiting to be taken through to get ready for the pick up procedure (hubby having dropped off his deposit when we got there, tehehe). I don’t know why I was nervous. It’s a pretty minor procedure, but the thought of them going up there with a long needle to aspirate the contents out of my ovaries didn’t sound like a bag of fun. They started off by giving me some kind of pill which was meant to be a sedative. Apparently it was meant to relax me and make it such that I would still be awake and alert but I wouldn’t care what they were doing to me (nurse’s words). What-the-hell-ever lady. I MORE than cared when she put the shunt in the back of my hand for the IV line. OW FREAKIN OW!
Ahhhh but they gave me MUCH better drugs in theater. As the lovely IVF nurse lady was pushing some magical substance into the IV line she informed me it may make me feel like I’ve had a couple of wines. As it turns out it felt more like a bottle of wine but nonetheless, it was rather enjoyable. I recall trying really hard to stop myself grinning from ear to ear. What happens next is you watch as the fluid from your follicles swishes past you via a long tube and is collected into a test tube by another lovely IVF nurse. She passes the test tube through to the embryologist in the lab next door, through what resembles a takeaway booth window. The embryologist then looks at them under a microscope and informs you right then and there if it contains an egg. It was pretty cool actually!
Afterwards I spent a while in recovery sleeping off the good drugs. Also, because they don’t let you eat or drink anything the morning of the procedure, you’re provided with some refreshments. I went for the triple chocolate muffin. This wasn’t just any muffin, but the hugest, most chocolatey muffin I’ve ever had. It was soooo good.
After they collect the eggs, they then inseminate them with hubbys morning donation, and start growing them up into embryos. They phoned me the next day to say that of the 9 eggs they collected, 5 had fertilised successfully. On Thursday they rang again to say that all 5 of them grew well and would be frozen for us. So now we have 5 potential offspring stored in a freezer somewhere, ready to be used whenever we’re ready. It doesn’t matter whether you get them out after 1 year or 10 years, they still have the same chance of survival, which is good to know. It’s a great safety net to have, although of course we’d much rather try and make one the old fashioned way first 🙂
A lump in the road 
Awesome… So happy that you had such a succesful ‘harvest’, did you get collectibles (fv) with that?
5 confirmed embryos is one hell of a safety net, a potentially weighty and heartaching problem – dealt to.
One less thing to worry about, at least for now.
With your immune system about to take a hammering – talk to your nurses/doctor if colloidal silver supplements would be a problem – it’s supposedly has ‘bacteria-static’ properties, doesn’t “kill” bugs, but stops them reproducing – could be a good idea with spring colds/flu and general health issues in the upcoming weeks?
Thinking of you and being damned impressed with how you and Todd are coping, way stauncher than I would be. Best of luck with what ever comes next.
x D
You were ‘awake’ for the procedure? I was sound asleep in
la la land. I woke wearing a wristband with the number of harvested
eggies and a smileyface on it. All good. The worst was later when I
had the most awful heavy painful cramping period of my life… and
the last one to date (Mar 2009) since I have been on zolodex (among
other things) ever since. I think in some ways my partner and I
were ‘good’ IVF patients seeing as that side of things was really
the last thing on our minds at the time – no doubt you were in a
similar boat.
I had a terrible one after the IVF too – and it sucked that it came 5 days after my very first chemo treatment. Had to go home from work because I was feeling so crap. Luckily my BFF was at my house when I got home, I just laid on the couch and she got me a wheatie thing for my back and anything else I needed.
One positive thing though is that I have had another period since the beginning of my chemo, which is a good sign that fertility may still be OK – it was very late (7 weeks or so after this one) but better than nothing I think! That was early last month.