Chugging Along...

(**Someone posted this image on Facebook today and I stole  borrowed it because it explains the goals of IVF perfectly)

Tonight will be my 8th dose of Follistim. I had monitoring yesterday morning that showed my follies were still small and had some growing to do (which is totally expected since I was on Follistim for 10 doses before I triggered last time). My left ovary was looking a little slower than my right, showing follicles that were too small to measure, so hopefully that slacker catches up by the end of the week! I need some good mature eggs to give me a chance at a good little embryo (or two). Deep down, I know Frosties are not going to happen for me, since it would be a miracle to get ONE good embryo, but it's obviously still a hope to have that option.

The doctor said I am probably looking at ER (egg retrieval surgery) for the weekend. My anxiety is magnified when I think about going through anesthesia again after the miserable experience I had last time. I hope the anesthesiologist can do something to make it better, but I am also going to book an "M Technique" hand massage for right before the procedure this time. My clinic offers it to women doing egg retrievals and embryo transfers, but I didn't realize last time, that I had to request it. My doctor also said that he would give me a prescription for a few pills for after the egg retrieval, to help with my anxiety, so I hopefully don't have such a panic attack this time.

 Just for fun, I decided to count out how many shots I have done so far....including last cycle and this cycle so far, by the end of today, I will have done 63 shots in my stomach, 5 shots in my butt and I don't know how many blood tests and obviously that count is still going!

 

This weekend, I tried to be more relaxed, with no planned activities like we have been doing. Of course, we ended up having to grocery shop and run other errands, so we ended up being out most of the day Saturday and then when we got home, we were too tired to even go out to dinner (which we usually do on Saturday night)! Sunday, we had to be up early for my monitoring at the doctor's office, then did a few things while we were out. When we got home, we had laundry to do (woohoo) and laundry is a serious pain in the ass where we live. There's only one machine for the whole building, so on the weekends you have to keep checking to see if someone is done with their load. The "new" machine they put in there leaks when it is used, so you have to be extra careful transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer, because ONE mistake lands your clean clothes in a flooded lake on the dirty floor of the basement laundry room! I CANNOT wait to move and have my own washer and dryer!
 While the laundry was going, we decided to carve/decorate out pumpkins since Halloween is on Thursday. I was feeling lazy about carving since that requires some kind of effort, so I blamed it on my swollen ovaries. I got some ideas from Pinterest and decided to GLITTER my pumpkins! J carved one of the pumpkins and I had him do seahorses to stick with my Little Mermaid theme for this cycle!

I do a calendar of Parker photos, so this is Parker's Fall shot!