Stim Day One

We woke up bright and early this morning, dropped Peeper off with Shrike's parents, doubled back to the house for Shrike's "be sure to bring this with you to every appointment" folder and headed down to the fertility clinic to get Shrike started on her IVF medications!

We were only about 20 minutes late which, they will soon learn, is great for us. Then we were there for way too long.

Shrike is starting the cycle with 18 follicles, which they keep telling is is "a lot!" and "great!" but it's less than half of what she had the cycle that we made Peeper (41).

(In case you're wondering, yes, I am quite sure that I will be comparing this to our Peeper cycle every step of the way.)

Anyway, so she has 18 follicles, plus a cyst leftover from where she ovulated last cycle. Which is fine, but it's over the 11 mm limit that requires them to check her blood work before allowing her to start the meds.

They could tell from the ultrasound that it was actually a cyst, and not an antral follicle, so it wasn't producing estrogen, so wouldn't throw off the blood work, but they had to officially see it first.

So, we went out for lunch, then came back and watched Real Housewives of Orange County on the tv in the waiting room (Wow. That was an hour of my life that I will never get back.) and then finally got to have the shots and hear all the instructions.

The nurse gave her the shot that was either the study med or a placebo, and I gave her the one that's either Follistim or a placebo, so that I could practice using the Follistim pen that I'll be using tomorrow and Monday (the two days that she doesn't have appointments).

Then, while we waited to make sure she didn't have any sort of adverse reaction from either injection, we scheduled the rest of her appointments (11 am everyday except tomorrow and Monday, until she's ready to trigger) and went over all the rest of the protocol.

The girls that we talked to today (AA and MG) said that they've had a couple of women ready to trigger by day 7 and one actually triggered on day 6, and the longest they've seen is day 14. That's a bit more of a spread than TN described, but everybody has said that the average has been about 8 days. She said that by Tuesday's ultrasound, we should be able to start narrowing down when to expect that.

At any rate, it should all be happening within the next couple of weeks!

Then, I dropped Shrike at work (No, we didn't leave her car there, because we didn't expect to be that late. So, Peeper and I have to go pick her up at 11 pm. Yippee.) and, after getting stuck in traffic for a while, I picked Peeper up and brought her home for a nice long nap (since she'd not had one yet).

We both got up around 7 pm and she's still kind of cranky-pants.

Some "hilarious!" (her words) YouTube videos seem to be helping with that.