I've been busy with getting school wrapped up, family in town for the holidays, and finding a job. Not to mention all the back and forth to the clinic (2 hour drive 1 way!) for this IVF cycle.
News:
1.) I GRADUATED NURSING SCHOOL!! It's still hard to believe that I'm not going back in the spring for another semester. I'm just waiting for my graduate nurse permit and authorization to test to come in the mail so I register for the NCLEX.
2.) I GOT A JOB!! I interviewed with a local hospital the day following my pinning ceremony and was offered a position as a graduate nurse. I am so excited to start working as a nurse! I go in tomorrow to get all my new hire paperwork signed and it's looking like my start date will be Jan. 13. Next week I am attending a Hurst review which will help me be better prepared for the NCLEX.
IVF stuff:
My last update was when I was on day 7 of stims. My last monitoring appointment was on Dec.16 and based on the results of that ultrasound they expected to be able to retrieve 8-10 eggs. I had a few follicles that were around 11 or 12 mm but those weren't expected to be mature by the time retrieval came around. I did my normal stim dose that evening and a smaller one the following morning and trigger with Novarel that evening.
I had my egg retrieval on Dec. 19 and they got 9 eggs and 8 of those were mature. They performed ICSI on those 8 and 6 of them fertilized. When we got to the day of transfer we had 3 blastocysts (2 5AA and 1 5AB) and 1 morula. We decided to transfer just 1 embryo and freeze the other 2 blastocysts. There were a couple of reasons for us deciding to do a single embryo transfer:
1.) We already have proven fertility (this is a comment the doctor said when we told him we only wanted to transfer 1)
2.) Transferring more embryos doesn't increase the odds of pregnancy by much but it does increase the odds of multiples by a lot
3.) We weren't comfortable with the added risks a multiple pregnancy poses at this time
After the transfer we had to stay the night near the clinic (still not sure why this was a requirement) and went home the following morning. On Sunday I had to drive back up to get my progesterone level checked and it came back low at 8.2 ng/ml. I had to increase my Crinone to 2x a day and take the mini dose of Novarel that evening and again in 4 days. The mini dose is supposed to support implantation by stimulating the corpus luteum to continue to secrete progesterone - at least that's what the nurse told me and based on my knowledge of the reproductive system it makes sense. What this also means is that I can't test at home since any positive I get on a test will be a result of the Novarel in my system. So I'm going beta or bust whether I wanted to or not.
If this embryo doesn't stick we will transfer both of our frozen blasts next time and hope for the best. We can't afford to do another fresh IVF for some time so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this works.
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