And Menopur is next...
I will be injecting 300IU of Follistim and 75IU of Menopur until next Tuesday when I go to my doctor for an ultrasound and some blood work to see how my body is responding at that point. He may adjust the dosage up or down depending on how many follicles he can see and what my E2 levels are.
Chances are I'm going to start feeling a bit different too. During my last IVF round, once I started injecting the stims, I began to feel more and more bloated as the days progressed. This is normal since my ovaries are "super producing" which makes them expand and causes the abdominal discomfort. I don't mind the pain if my body can produce lots of eggs!!
Last time around I was on a different protocol of drugs. I used Bravelle (instead of Follistim) with Menopur as my stims. Also, I took birth control pills for 17 days prior to stimming instead of using Lupron to calm my ovaries. At the end of the cycle my body hadn't responded as well as my doctor and I would have liked. My eggs were not great quality. They harvested 9 in total, but 2 of them were immature, 2 more were too mature so the cell walls were cracked, which left only 5 viable eggs to try to fertilize. Of those 5 only 2 did. They transferred those two embryos back into my uterus hoping that at least one would implant and become a pregnancy, but neither did. Since they were the only two embryos we had, there were none to freeze to try again with later. We were very sad and it felt like biggest loss ever. We had been given a picture of the two, microscopic embryos that they had put back. And for the two weeks before my pregnancy test I touched my belly a lot and spoke to the embryos saying, "I'm so glad to have you inside me, please get comfortable. I will take really good care of you!!" It was the closest I've ever felt to being pregnant because we had our embryos picture on the fridge to remind us constantly. ( I would post it here, but looking at the photo makes me too sad.) It was devastating to learn that they had not made it.
But...here we are again with another chance for a miracle!!!
My doctor hopes that the Lurpon has done a better job of quieting my ovaries so that this time my eggs are not so staggered in development. Also he told me that the Follistim is more purified than the Bravelle so it will hopefully have a stronger effect and cause my body to produce more, better quality eggs.
So we all have great EGGSpectaions for this round!! GROW EGGIES GROW!!!!!
Good luck with the IVF! And thanks for the support on my blog. :)
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