Eggs Last Dose - Getting Close!

I was slightly nervous about my ultrasound today. I have all those follicles growing and am beginning to feel it a little bit, feel some pressure from my over-sized ovaries. I felt that same pressure the last time I did in vitro, but it wasn't until the day before my egg retrieval. So I'm worried things are moving too quickly, that all my eggs are going to bail on me or something.

Not only that, but my estrogen levels are through the roof. Remember that the growing follicles produce estrogen, so it makes sense that my levels would be high since I have so many follicles growing and producing all that hormone. Normally, a woman will have her estrogen levels peak at around 200 to 250. What's my level? About 1700!

Couple things I'm worried about here. Since estrogen builds up the lining of my uterus, and my estrogen levels are crazy high, am I going to have a Great Wall of China built up by the time I put some embryos in there? The theory is that too much lining can actually be a bad thing.

Also, I do worry about hyper-stimulating my ovaries. It's a real thing where your body can have this reaction to all the hormones and you can end up with some serious bloating, abdominal pain, shortness of breath, and the list goes on. I'm not too worried about getting hospitalized or anything, but it does happen and it will mess up our plans a little bit. There are a couple of signs that your ovaries are hyper-stimulating and high estrogen levels are one of the signs.

I wouldn't call it worry. I'm not obsessing about it or wringing my hands over any of it. Curious is a better word, and a little anxious just to see how it's going to play out.

But after my blood work and ultrasound today, I'm feeling excited again. My follicles are looking excellent. The doctor measures all the major ones so we can get an overall picture of what's happening in there. He had the data up on his laptop and I told him I'd love a print out of that. So here's what happening in my ovaries.

All the numbers represent the measurements. A follicle that's ready for egg retrieval will measure at 17 or 18, which is about the size of a penny. So you can see that we have five follicles ready to go already, and about nine others that are getting really close, measuring at 14 or above. We have a few others that are close but may not fully develop. No matter the size of the follicle, the doctors will get out everything they can at the egg retrieval so I could still end up with 20-something eggs. But at this point, I'm expecting about 15 to fertilize, which is a great number. If I have 20 or more fertilize, I'll feel pretty lucky!

Here's the link to my ultrasound video. But I took some still shots from my video so you could see what's going on and compare with where we started.

This is my right ovary when we started. Little follicles just waiting to be showered in FSH.

And this is my right ovary now! Wowzahs!

 This is my left ovary at the beginning.

This is my left ovary now!

Remember that they watch the embryos grow over a period of three to five days and there will be plenty of embryos that stop developing at that point. That's a good thing because we don't want to put in embryos that are destined to fail. So I may end up with 15 eggs fertilized, but I expect to have three to six good embryos left after that waiting period.

They keep an eye on my estrogen levels so we did more labs today to see whether they shot through the roof again. If they do continue to rise dramatically, they will worry about hyper-stimulating so we'll have to do things a little differently. They'll still get the eggs out and fertilize them, still watch them to see who progresses, but they won't put any embryos in. They'll freeze them all and let my body cool down from all those hormones. They don't want me getting pregnant while my body is having a severe reaction to all these injections and wacko hormone levels.

After a month or two, we can thaw the embryos and put them in, after my body has normalized. It's a lot less involved, none of those FSH injections and crazy hormone levels. We just make sure the uterus is good and ready and we put the embryos in. Studies have shown that frozen embryos actually do better, with a 10 or 15 percent increase in success rates. But it's not the embryos so much as the woman's body. All those hormones we use for in vitro may be messing things up a little, making things a little haywire. An embryo going into a a more normalized atmosphere will do better without all that craziness going on.

A lot of doctors are pushing for women to do this now, to freeze everything and do an embryo transfer later on, and I won't lie that it's appealing because of the research done. But, of course, it costs more money so that's my hesitation. Still, I need to be open to it in case my estrogen levels skyrocket.

Thankfully, my estrogen levels went down a little bit, from 1700 to about 1500. They had me on a lower dose of FSH last night and they also had me take that Cetrotide so I wouldn't release those eggs. They're guessing that's why my numbers went down.

So, the plan is for me to go back to my 300 units tonight, which will be my last night of stimulating those follicles. That should be enough to bump those mid-range follicles up to where they need to be, and we may gain a few more too. Fingers crossed. I will have another ultrasound tomorrow morning, plus more labs to keep an eye on the estrogen, and then I'll take a trigger shot that evening. That gets those follicles ready for their big debut and is timed very specifically so that they don't release on their own but are just ready to go when I do my egg retrieval. My egg retrieval will be Wednesday morning, September 30th!

And the doctor told me that your uterine lining will usually stop building up after a certain point, so I'm not worried about my Great Wall of China anymore. What a relief!