The Final Countdown

I had my last ultrasound before retrieval today–14 fully mature follicles, plus about 20 small ones. The nurse said that they often find more when they’re “poking around in there,” and the way she plunged her finger in the air as she said it made me quite happy I’ll be asleep for the whole thing.

So, trigger tonight and retrieval Sunday morning! My E2 was 2279 yesterday, which is pretty good, but she warned me that I need to be eating more protein to avoid hyperstimulation. That one is a little trickier because I don’t eat meat often and have had zero appetite during stims anyway. But I thought this sounded like a good excuse to go to Whole Foods and buy one of those ridiculously expensive grilled salmon filets they have in the deli. I’ve also been chugging Gatorade and Ensure during stims, and I think it’s helped so far.

My biggest fear is that once my eggs are out, the doctor will see they’re poor quality, or immature, or none of them will fertilize. There are so many ways this could go wrong–the success rates for IVF are really not as high as I used to think. But then my wife reminds me that’s why we bought this super expensive IVF package, which gives us 6 cycles to try and make a baby. If it doesn’t work, we get all of our money back. But I’m hoping this cycle at LEAST gives us some frozen embryos, because doing a fresh cycle with all the meds again sounds miserable. My belly is super sore.