After the egg collection, most of my focus is on recovering.
I have to inject myself twice a day all over again, and I’ve come to the point that I absolutely HATE it.
I’m still in pain from the surgery so anything on top that feels like a lot to bear. It’s even worse because I thought I was done with the needles, but now I’m not and the blood thinners really hurt when I inject them and leave massive bruises, I’m just done.
I’m also terrible at staying in bed all day. Especially because we’re in a small hotel room, I get cabin fever easily and insist on going out, even though it’s cold and horrible outside and every step I take hurts. I am not in the sanest of mindsets!
Because of the OHSS I am not getting an embryo at the end of this, and that’s really starting to sink in now. I don’t want to go home, still sore, still sick, and have nothing to show for it.
Luckily I have nice painkillers, and I do sleep at night. Every day it gets a little easier to dress myself, to bend over, to walk.
After being nauseous for so many days, my appetite is starting to come back as well. We eat a lot of grapes and crackers and cheese. We watch Netflix from the hotel bed.
And… We get an update on our eggs!
The phone rings, and my stomach tenses. “Hello???”
It’s the embryologist. We’re asked to confirm our full names and birth dates – I guess they don’t want to tell the wrong people about the wrong eggs – and then we hear that out of my seventeen eggs that were collected, ten fertilised normally.
Part of me had wanted all of them to get this far, but it doesn’t work like that in nature either. Some of the eggs must have been too immature to fertilise. And for some of them it might have started out right but then gone wrong somehow, that just happens. Ten is still a brilliant number!
We had normal IVF, not ICSI, so the sperm cells were not manipulated in any way.
I can imagine it, first my seventeen little eggs floating about in a little Petri dish. And then the donor sperm being released into their little pool – ready, set, go!
For ten of them, it worked, and they’re now zygotes. Two cells, heading to four, then eight.
We’re rooting for you!
Ten??? Wow that’s brilliant, congratulations! Sounds very promising for the next step. Try to rest as much as possible, I hope you’ll recover quickly. Merry Christmas to you and Jo and best wishes. :-)
Yes, we never even thought to get that many eggs in the first place! We are very lucky. Thank you, and wishing you both a wonderful Christmas as well! :)