One more day of FSH

Nancy, our IVF nurse, was VERY pleased with the progress my ovaries are making. She and our reproductive endocrinologist ordered one more night and one more morning of FSH. This means that tomorrow night Jonathan will give me the trigger shot.

The trigger shot is hCG (that's right, the pregnancy hormone) called Pregnyl and will cause my body to ovulate. After five straight days of forcing hormones to STOP by body from ovulating, the Pregnyl is administered to convince it that yes, it IS time to ovulate and that it needs to be on time. And it must ovulate precisely when egg retrieval is being performed in order to capture the most number of mature eggs possible. My clinic will let me know tomorrow what time to give myself the Pregnyl and exactly 36 hours later I will be under the knife....er.... needle that is.

I've been freaking myself out all afternoon googling images of egg retrieval. These are not graphic, thank goodness but they are still unsettling when I think about all that is at stake. http://www.avapeter.com/p/en/483-1.gif

I will be under "twilight" anesthesia for Friday's egg retrieval. It is similar to the anesthesia used for dental work and colonoscopies; I will be semi-awake and able to respond to commands but will I won't remember a thing. Which is great, because I'm pretty sure that stuff could haunt your nightmares.

While I am under, Jonathan will be providing a... sample.... to fertilize the eggs. Each of my eggs will be fertilized by a procedure called ICSI, or intracytoplasmic sperm injection. It sounds complicated and I'm sure it's not easy but it's simple enough to break down; ICSI is basically just injecting one single sperm into one single egg with a microscopic glass needle. Technology is amazing, isn't it?

Jonathan and I will get a call sometime Saturday to let us know how many eggs were retrieved and how many were mature enough for the embryologist to fertilize with ICSI. Then we wait for more news as the microscopic embyros grow. After three to five days of growing, we will hopefully have at least two embryos to transfer back to my uterus. The rest will be frozen for later. We're desperately hoping that "later" means when the kid conceived this month is ready for a sibling and not "later" this year because this IVF wasn't successful.

It is really hard to believe that we're getting ready for egg retrieval. This has been months, even years in the works. We actually have a 50% or greater chance of becoming pregnant next week. Incredible!