On August 19, all reservations and fears now gone, DH and I went in for our first ultrasound. I was a tiny bit worried that I might have a cyst blocking me from starting as I have had in the past, but everything was perfect; start injecting!
I am not going to explain all of the medications as I have in the past since you can just look them up yourself, but for those who are interested I was on a very strong mix this time! Along with a bunch of vitamins I have been on all summer (Vitamin C, D and Q10) I was given 300IU of Gonal-F as well as 75IU Luveris daily. Half way through I began using Cetrotide too and on the last day I had a one-time dose of Suprefact to trigger ovulation. These are all injectable by the way! I felt like a pin cushion again but much more confident doing my own shots than I have been in the past. As much as IVF is considered to be “free” in Quebec, when you add up the costs of these injections alone it adds up fast! Gonal-F and Luveris cost over 1$ per IU and I was using 375IU a day for a total of 8 days in addition to the others so you do the math. I have great health insurance, but even they have a lifetime maximum coverage for these things of 5000$ and we are about to max that out now.
Because of the potential for being pretty sick we decided to call off all birthday celebration plans for me this year. I was a little bummed, but not really. DH bought me the Tiffany Infinity ring I have wanted for a while now and we went for dinner at The Keg downtown, just us. Since it was such a beautiful day we walked around for a while first and with every step I was getting increasingly uncomfortable. There is a song by Tori Amos that says “I got a bowling ball in my stomach, I got a desert in my mouth…” and it has nothing to do with this but it’s the only way I could describe it. I felt like I had bowling balls rolling around inside of me and I was really dehydrated. I could barely even finish my birthday supper because I felt so full and bloated. And, when we went for our second ultrasound the next day I found out why.
I have NEVER responded to hormone injections the way I did this time! The hormonal cocktail had worked in abundance! They measure the follicles in your ovaries to determine egg maturity and I had so many follicles they could hardly count them! See, the injections are meant to stimulate follicle growth, but you can’t control how many respond. And, because of the PCOS, I have a lot of follicles to begin with. This time, they all answered the call! My ovaries were so full and swollen that I could almost tell you exactly where they were inside of me at any given time. Everything had a dull ache and I had frequent stabbing pains. In fact, from being poked and prodded that morning, they triggered a massive case of nausea followed by a migraine due to the pain and I think I slept all day long! It was (happily) horrible.
The bad news? I was now definitely at risk for OHSS.
The good news? That made my egg collection fall on a day with anesthesia because they couldn’t wait any longer!
To be continued… again…
