Egg Retrieval & Transfer Plans

I thought I'd be on more of a break from blogging, but I'm feeling pretty good & I'm kind of bored so I thought why not stay on top of things and draft up a blog post about our progress so far.  

Tuesday night we headed up to Rockford.  We got there around 8:30 or so, I was exhausted since on Monday night I had to set alarms for 9pm (my bedtime is 8:30), 11pm, and then 4:45am.  9pm was the first dose of Dostinex which is an OHSS preventative, 11pm was Lupron trigger & anti-viral for cold sores, and 4:45am was wake up and head to the hospital for an early morning blood draw.  So by the time we actually got to Rockford and got checked in I was ready to go to bed.  I didn't think I'd sleep good since I was anxious about the retrieval, but I was wrong, I slept amazingly in a huge California king Sleep Number bed with lots of pillows and comfy blankets!

Wednesday my alarm went off at 7am, I had to take a dose of Pepcid with a sip of water before the procedure.  We left the hotel about 8:45 to arrive at the office by 9:00.  We only waited a few minutes before being brought back to our recovery room where I was instructed to put on that lovely gown with the ties in back and those fun blue, no-slip socks.  They took my vitals, let me use the restroom, and we waited for a very short period of time before the anesthesiologist came in to make sure I was comfortable with her procedure.  Joe was whisked off to give his sample and returned just a few minutes later (yep, he was fast!). About 10ish they wheeled me into the procedure room, gave me an IV and immediately started pumping me with half the dose of anesthesia.  I could feel it right away, but kept blabbing away about my no-chip 4th of July manicure to the nurse and the anesthesiologist (who was a women), but they did ask me about it!

The next thing I knew I was feeling foggy and crampy and finally waking up.  I had some really bad pain, so they gave me a little bit more medicine via IV both for pain and for nausea.  Shortly there after, the doctor came in to tell us that we retrieved 34 eggs! I was so happy with this number.  Last time we had counted we counted 28, so I knew that our number would be high, but I didn't think 34 of them!  They also said that Joe's sperm looked really good, they gave us the numbers, but I was in such a haze all I cared about remembering was the 34.  The rest was the typical coming out of anesthesia, some animal crackers and Propel water until I felt good enough to get dressed, then off to the car to fall asleep the entire way home.

I've been instructed to drink lots of electrolytes, weigh myself & measure my abdominal girth each day, start PIO shots tonight (OMG!!), and Vivelle patches today.  I got a call from the embryologist who told me we ended up with 21 out of our 34 eggs fertilized.  One egg was damaged, 16 eggs were fertilized with the standard procedure and 17 were fertilized with ICSI.  12 of the standard procedure fertilized and 9 of the ICSI fertilized.  I am thrilled with these numbers!  Our transfer is scheduled for Monday.  We were really hoping to do a 5 day blastocyst transfer and they said that all looked good to be able to do so!