20

I have been a very bad blogger. Things have been a little crazy, and I have been struggling to keep up. Joseph has had a busy week or two at work. His busy week just happened to coincide with the worst of my IVF cycle. Add a two year old into that mixture, and you have an exhausted, hormonal mommy that doesn't blog.

We started this cycle pretty normally. My last cycle started off with too little medicine, and it was an uphill battle the entire time. We ended up with six mature eggs. This time my doctor had the goal of more eggs. He started me out at a higher dose of medicines, expecting me to respond similarly to our last cycle.

My body decided to take that medicine seriously this time. My first blood work showed that my body was overly responding. My medicines were decreased, and we officially were dealing with too many eggs. My estrogen level was way too high. We went from threatening cancellation due to under stimulation to threatening cancellation due to overstimulation.

My monitoring office was guessing that I had thirty plus measurable eggs. That is a lot! I was obviously uncomfortable and the high estrogen levels made me feel horrible. We were not sure how many of those thirty plus would be mature. My doctor guessed fifteen, but I was a bit skeptical after my six from last time.

We pushed through and made it to the egg retrieval today....

They got 20 mature eggs! I was shocked when I woke up from the anesthesia. That doubles the amount that I got from my first cycle (9).

So now we wait. We have to see how our fertilization report goes. IVF is such a numbers game. You start out with a number, and slowly the number drops as time goes on. I'm just hoping for enough to transfer and freeze a few. Anything more than that is a bonus.