Whoa Nelly

(If you're following along with IVF #4, you may be interested in following some of my cycle sisters as well that I listed in my last blog post.)

CD 7 today, based on my clinic counting first day of stims as CD 2. Went in this morning for ultrasound and bloodwork (serious bloodwork - NK, TH1:TH2, estradiol, prolactin, progesterone, LH = 7 vials).

Now, normally I'm a long stim girl -- my retrievals have been on days 14-16 for my previous three IVF cycles.

Not this time. My right ovary has 5 follicles -- the biggest is 15mm! Quick, get some Ganirelix in her! They actually loaned me a Ganirelix so I could take one this morning at the clinic, and when I go back in on Thursday I'll give them one of mine.

So right ovary has a 15mm, a 13mm, an 11mm, a 10mm and a 9mm. The left ovary has two follicles, the larger of which is about 9mm.

Apparently the extra long estrogen priming meant they were really juiced up. Not fabulous, since there's a pretty big spread between the biggest and the largest, but that's what we have to work with.

On one hand, I'm disappointed, because in October we got 6 eggs from 7 follicles, and half were mature. It's likely we'll probably get 4 and 2 will be mature. And then with PGD, we may end up with zero. But, we knew going in that we're likely to have to do a couple of retrievals before getting a good embryo to transfer. And retrieval happening sooner means the next one can happen a little sooner too, should we not get any good embryos this time around.

Silver lining -- this will be the first cycle where I haven't had to order additional meds! At $800/Gonal F pen (for 2 days worth of meds) that's handy.

The hormone bloodwork came back this afternoon and my estrogen is at 714, prolactin/progesterone/LH were all properly low. In October, my estrogen was at 848 on CD 11 and 1137 on the day of trigger (CD13), so I'm way ahead.

Next monitoring is Thursday, and he expects that I'll trigger Thursday night for a Saturday retrieval. The NK results should come back Thursday and the TH1:TH2 will come back Friday. Since my Intralipid was last Thursday I suspect he'll only have me do one with retrieval if my levels are still elevated (last time he did one even though they were normal, but it had been a few weeks since the Intralipid and he wanted to be proactive.)

In unrelated news, I had lunch with a friend who confided that she recently had to terminate a pregnancy at 20 weeks due to an incompatibility-with-life diagnosis. The CVS showed no problems so it was a complete surprise. Heartsick for her...