Well this sucks.

For anyone who was hoping for a good news post, this will not be it. As much as I would have really loved to have something positive to share we haven't had much of that over the past week.

Since my egg retrieval last Sunday I have pretty much been a cloud of pain and nausea meds since I developed moderate/ severe OHSS (ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome) that was kind of scary and overall just very unpleasant to deal with. You can google it if you want, but in a nutshell OHSS is where after egg retrieval/ ovulation your hormones go kind of haywire and your body decides to retain fluid, causing the very fun side effects of pain, nausea, dehydration, and abdominal swelling. I felt ok Sunday and Monday after retrieval and then Tuesday into Wednesday started feeling worse and worse- I usually am not a nauseous person but when one anti-nausea med was not enough and I had to go on another and then that still wasn't enough I was not a happy patient. Plus my abdomen from Tuesday on looked like someone had stuck a balloon in my stomach and inflated it, making absolutely everything uncomfortable including walking and sleeping.

I wound up so miserable that I went in to see the Dr on Wednesday afternoon and then went in to get fluid drained on Thursday. 3 liters, from my abdomen. Kind of gross even to me. Thankfully, I didn't end up with the "worst" stage of OHSS which would have been either hopitalization for dehydration or the insertion of a drain into my side for a week or two to allow fluid to continuously drain. I definitely felt better after the procedure, but then still had the swelling/ pain/ nausea trifecta for several more days since draining the fluid provides a temporary solution but it does come back. Today (Monday) is the first day I am feeling sort of perkier, and by that I mean it's 10 am and I'm just starting to contemplate whether I can get by without some nausea medicine. Supposedly I'll feel mostly better by the end of the week.

Then on Saturday, to add insult to injury we got news about our embryos. Out of the 30 that we had at the beginning of the week only 3 had made it to Saturday, and 1 was graded "fair" and 2 "poor". So, this sucks. We spent a while talking to the Dr and the thinking is that something is happening with the DNA that is causing it to mismatch and therefore not have viable embyros. 

Not the best weekend in our household to say the least. But for the time being I'll be recovering and figuring out options going forward.

Easter Eggs

We started our IVF cycle on 3/22, anticipating a 4/2 egg retreival. Things went fairly smoothly during the stim process, although if you ask my husband I probably wasn't too pleasant to be around for a while. We ended up scheduling my retrieval for Friday 4/3, but of course with me things do no go quite according to plan. My Dr wanted to do a Lupron trigger since I had produced a lot of eggs, to try to bring my hormone levels down a little faster. In reading about it, I could see that there are rare cases where the Lupron trigger doesn't work and asked the nurse about it. Was told that they would get bloodwork done the day after to check levels and make sure the trigger worked. Well. Went in Friday for the retrieval, and before even going in had sort of a disaster as they couldn't get an IV on me, ended up being stuck about 8 times for the IV and Jacob ended up being the one to get it. This is all as Dr is pacing outside the door saying that we really have to get started and can't be late. No pressure.

So then I get in the room, he starts getting eggs and realizes that I have not triggered. What??!! I really couldn't believe that they had messed this up, and not caught it with the blood work. Apparently my progesterone level was elevated, but given the number of eggs I had it should have been much higher to mean that I triggered.

Back home on Friday, with black and blue arms from all the sticks. Ended up doing another trigger on Friday night, this time HCG, and scheduled the second retrieval for Sunday morning. Went in to hospital to Jacob's colleague on Saturday afternoon to get an IV put in to try and prevent another disaster like Friday morning. So, I spend an uncomfortable night Saturday trying to sleep with and IV in my arm, but got up Sunday and went in and things went much smoother.

Overall results: they retrieved 44 eggs, fertilized 37, and as of today (Day 1) have 30 embryos. This is good so far.....we will see how they are doing on Thursday and then decide how many to send for genetic testing. Now fingers crossed that a decent amount have good genes.....