the (mis)adventures of jenna

Disclaimer:  This post will contain the words “ovary”, “ovulate”, “egg”, “cycle”, and “uterus” in reference to myself.  If you think this is disgusting or creepy, you don’t have to read this.  I won’t be offended.

I’m feeling super good right now.  Like fresh, energized, and zippy.  I figure the next two weeks are going to be my best two weeks in the foreseeable future, so I plan to live them with gusto, y’all.  GUSTO.

Anyways, I told you I’d summarize how the whole process would work, and I’m here to make good on the promise.

So currently I’m taking birth control to regulate my cycle.  The reason they’re doing this is so that they can tweak it up just right because, on November 21st, I’ll start injecting Follistim into my stomach so Dr. Babyplease can make my ovaries go gangbusters.  I’ll shoot myself up every evening for 10 days, so if anyone plans to hang out with me in the evening from Nov 21 – Dec 1, just prepare yourself for me going off to the bathroom around 9:00 to give myself at least one injection but, depending on where we are in the cycle, up to three.

To start things off, Dr. Babyplease is hopping my poor little ovaries up on Follistim so that they produce more than one follicle.  I think, but am not certain, that that’s the same thing as an egg.  In any case, the whole point of the injections is that I’ll produce somewhere between 10-30 eggs in a cycle, instead of the measly one we women normally crank out.

My poor little ovaries, though.  They’re going to get all upset by the Follistim and, can I just say the side effects list for Follistim sounds pretty awful?  Things like severe and sharp pains, bursting follicles, and other grodies I will just not even mention because it won’t edify any of us.

So, after I get really, really good at injecting myself with Follistim every evening we’ll start going in about every other day for blood work and ultrasounds.  These will help Dr. Babyplease know if I need to be taking less or more of the medicine, and it’ll help her see if I’m going to have any really painful side effects.  If she can catch those early, she can make adjustments to the medicine regiment.

On Nov 26 (HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO JENNA) I will start another injectable medicine called Ganirelix.  Within a day or two, I’ll also add Centrotide, which is also an injectable. This bad boy costs over $1,000 per shot, friends.  Yes, you read that correctly.

Aside: When I spoke with the fertility pharmacy earlier today, I asked what the out of pocket costs for all these drugs were, just because I was curious.  It’s out of control expensive.  I’m so thankful that we have insurance.  So thankful.  Otherwise we wouldn’t even be able to think about this.

The weekend of Thanksgiving, we’ll be pretty much living at the fertility clinic for daily labs and ultrasounds.  Also, by this point, I will be feeling pretty much like death.  So…if I bite your head off, I apologize in advance.

All of these medicines are working together to cause me to not ovulate, but at the same time to make a crazy amount of eggs. Somewhere around December 2, we’ll be going in for the egg retreival procedure.  Thirty-six hours before that (and thirty-six hours exactly), I will give myself a HCG shot which will chemically force my body to begin the ovulation process.

However, the morning of Dec 2 or Dec 3, we’ll get up and get ready like normal.  Except this morning we will not put on any cologne, perfume or stop anywhere to get gas on the way.  Why?  Because those fumes are toxic to baby egglets.  Strong odors can actually kill them, so the ARTS Department and OR have tons of air filters everywhere to suck out all the smells.

CRAZY.

Once we arrive at the hospital, we’ll waltz into the operating room at Presby (second time this year, y’all!) and Dr. Babyplease will use what looks like an internal ultrasound wand with, here’s the kicker, an 18 inch needle on the end of it.

I KNOW.

I almost threw up when the nurse told me that.

But I’ll be asleep, so I won’t know it’s happening…probably.

Anyway, Dr. Babyplease will use the ultrasound wand to find where my ovaries are, then she will STAB ME THROUGH SEVERAL ORGANS in order to get to my ovaries, where she will do something involving the word “burst” (I stopped listening after that part) and use the needle to suction out all the eggs I have spent the last 10 days cranking out for her.

Within an hour, they have fertilized the eggs in a petri-dish where they will stay for either three or five days.

I will go home and lay down, because apparently I’ll feel kind of like death following the procedure.

Meh.  I should be totally used to it by then.

So, for either three or five days, the eggs will marinate.  The day they’re transferred back into me depends entirely on how they’re doing.  (The reason they can’t be transferred on day 4 is that they are turning into blastocysts on day 4 and the dish can’t be opened during that process.  Who knew!?)

On transfer day, they’ll just slide them right into my uterus using a tube.  A TUBE.  Joey could even watch….if he felt like it.  That sounds gross to me, though, and pretty creep-tastic.  After the float them into my uterus, they’ll close my cervix (SORRY, there is no other word for that) up tightly so the little babies can’t fall out.  That was actually a huge relief to me, I wondered if I was going to have to lay down for like 3 days, or what.  But no, they pretty much just cork me.

HOLY COW.  Now that I’ve typed all this I feel a little freaked out.  Maybe I need to bake some cupcakes.

This afternoon, as I was ruminating on my morning of information overload, I thought back to when I was in first grade and Mom read The Wonderful Way That Babies Are Made to me.  In that book there was nothing about a Petri dish, nothing about Follistim injections.  And I actually busted up laughing (probably looked like a crazy person) because if this works and someday our kids ask where babies come from?  We’ll tell them the doctor mixed them up in a Petri dish and floated them back inside Mommy using a plastic tube while Daddy held my hand, to make sure everything went OK.

That’s so much easier than explaining the other way.