The Eagle Has Landed
...and by eagle I mean my giant box of medication. The meds came yesterday, and although in the grand scheme of things, the amount of medications my doctor has precribed for me is a few injections less than what most ladies going through IVF have to take, (I was not prescribed Lupron! A drug that causes severe headaches and turns you into a hormonal monster) opening the giant Fedex package and pulling out its contents was kind of overwhelming.
L series Canon lens or a giant box of medication? It boggles the mind that they cost about the same.
On to the real drama...
I went to my suppression check bright and early this morning and they found a baby cyst when they were performing my ultrasound. The nurse then took a vial of blood and sent me on my way saying the doctor will give me a call after he looks at the ultrasound results to see if we can proceed with our cycle as planned. Um, hello... news flash... what? I didn't even know you could fail a suppression check!
The problem with my fertility clinic is, although the staff are very nice and we love our doctor, they are not very proactive about educating clients all about the IVF process which is very frustrating. Maybe because not everyone is crazy and type A like me and they don't need to know the chemistry and biology of it all. Maybe a "normal" patient will just do as they are told and will not ask a billion questions like I do?
I refuse to believe that! If you are going through IVF or are currently considering IVF, you've spent days googling the process. You've spent all your weekends reading infertility/IVF blogs. You've emailed everyone you know who has ever had any kind of infertility consult/ procedure just to have some kind of human connection to this strange thing you're considering. When that well of information ran dry, I'm sure you took the step into la-la land and decided to reach out to complete strangers on the internet just to get their advice and viewpoints on things. I know you've done your homework....Unless I'm just an insane, loner-nut job because that's totally what I did...
So now that we've established that I'm a complete looney when it comes to IVF information, you can understand why it's so dang frustrating for me to find out that I may fail my suppression check while I'm still sitting at said suppression check!
BTW my clinic schedules your suppression check the day before you are set to begin injections. Which means that it won't matter that you've scheduled time off of work, coordinated all the other aspects of your life to fit your IVF schedule, and carefully planned the delivery of your medication. Because if your body is defective, and it decides to screw you over by growing a few follicles too large too early, or it decides that it was fun to develop cysts inside your uterus even though you've been on birth control and had a hysteroscopy a week earlier, your cycle may get canceled and you will get to find all of this out the day before your first scheduled shot. Fun huh?
I know that every clinic is different and most people are not as info obsessed as I am. But the lack of patient education at my clinic will basically have me resorting to using google as if I'm planning on going to med school to become a reproductive endrocrinologist.
Also, did I mention how thankful I am for the internet and a million of wonderful ladies who say to hell with privacy and decide to share their IVF journey on the net? I don't think I could do this without their stories and expertise and generous advice.
Anyway, now that my rant is over, back to my results.
6 agonizing hours later I got a call from my nurse saying that Dr.S was not too concerned with the cyst as he plans on draining that sucker later. She told me that the progesterone and estradiol levels in my blood were low enough for them to consider me suppressed. Which means husband will get to jab me in the stomach with my first shot in the AM!
Stay tuned for that.
I'm leaving you with a picture of the lovely ultrasound machine with the, ahem, "wand-like" device that I will get the pleasure of becoming well acquainted with in the upcoming weeks. Fun thing to get to do at 7:30 in the morning huh?
