Monitoring Madness

Yet again, we were off to the fertility clinic bright and early this morning (although much less bright - and about twenty minutes less early - than we were supposed to be), for yet another look-see at our little follie-ollies.

After the exam, I was interrogating the nurse, and Shrike said, rolling her eyes, "She's writing a book."

I said, "Well, I probably could!"

The nurse said, "Oh, you have a blog, don't you? Nurse E was looking at it the other day, and we were all laughing."

(In a good way, I hope!)

Boy, I'm glad I've never aired any complaints here about the care or service we've received (mostly because I've not had any).

So - howdy to all the crew at our fertility clinic! Feel free to comment if you'd like.

No need to worry about HIPAA because, well - have you read the blog? Short of posting photos of us in the stirrups, there's really not much more personal you could get!

And, now, the numbers . . . .

Nurse D says that "The cycle is looking picture perfect. It's a bit on the long side, but given how many follicles she had to start with, we wanted to be careful with the meds, and a slow, long cycle is better in that case."

Her estrogen is 1351, which is rising nicely, but not getting into any scary areas.

They saw 23 follicles, but there could be more hiding behind them.

They measure the twelve largest and don't worry about the others. She has one at 15 mm, and the rest are between 10.5 mm - 13.7 mm.

We're leaving her Menopur the same and dropping the Gonal-F to 75 units tonight. Lupron stays at 10 units in the morning.

We will go to their main office tomorrow (and Sunday) to monitor, and will continue to monitor daily until we trigger (3 - 4 follicles at 18 mm or larger).

Both nurses that I talked to today are estimating that she's likely to be ready to trigger on Monday, for retrieval on Wednesday.

We're hoping for a day earlier, though, since she's off work Tuesday and my schedule is lighter that day. That would also put us transferring on Sunday, so I'd only miss one day of work and she'd miss none. Also, we'd have all day together on Sunday to do the trigger shot, rather than having to figure out logistics to do it on Monday, 36 hours before retrieval, when she's likely to be at work.

We'll make it work whenever it needs to be, but for many reasons, Tuesday would be a lot more convenient for us, so, please send some "Grow, follies, grow!" mojo our way, if you don't mind.

Oh, and I also found out today that they will be fertilizing our eggs by ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection - pronounced "ik-see"), in which they inject a sperm directly into each egg. They evidently do this with all their frozen sperm IVF.

That's pretty freaking fancy and very, very cool.

Only the best for our baby/ies!