Day 1

Well today is the day it all begins. Heck, I guess it really began 5 years ago, but whatever.

I have invited you all here because I know you all want to share in our Journey with our second IVF. Last cycle, it was nice to keep everyone posted via email. But this time, I thought we'd join the information age and try a blog. So, here it is. Not too exciting yet. Just remember to check back, as we meet different milestones I will update.

OK. Here we go.

Drug List:
1. Leuprolide (supression)
2. Follistim (stim)
3. Menopur (stim)
4. Progestrone (post E/T)

Here is the "quick and dirty" run down of the process.
- Begin with suppression of Kim's ovaries
- Stimulate Kim's ovaries to have more happy eggs than an Easter Basket
- The doctor takes out Kim's very happy eggs -- this is called Egg Retrieval or "E/R" for the cool readers
- They add Jeff's guys to Kim's eggs and they hang out in a petri dish -- dividing hopefully. This will create our embryo's. At this point we all pray "grow Embies grow"
- After 3 days of happy dividing and growing (we pray), they transfer the dividing eggs to Kim -- this is called Egg Transfer or "E/T". Now we pray that one sticks like Velcro to Kim.
- Next we wait 2 very long weeks to find out if this all works. During these 2 weeks, Kim will be considered PUPO -- pregnant until proven otherwise
- Last step is we find out the results...

As you can tell, this starts off kind of boring, but ends with lots of stressful moments. I hope you all will understand if I snap at you or become very crabby. It's a side effect of my drugs. It's nothing personal. In advance, I already apologize :). Jeff is already on red alert. Ask him about my pre-shot meltdown on our way to Home Depot yesterday. All we were going to do was pick out molding, next thing you know there I am crying about nothing. I think I might have been upset about giving up beer and caffeine, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

Jan 22st we begin our first shot of Leuprolide to begin our "suppression." So, basically they want to shut my cycle down, so eventually we can grow some pretty eggs. I will begin with the Leuprolide tonight. It's kind of a timing thing (my instructions are to give it between 4pm and 10pm). So, I think we decided every night (for at least the next 10 nights) we will do the shot at 8pm. How fun is that? Well, at least the needle is small. As a bulletin board member just described the process to me, I will:
"Grab the belly fluff and stab it in." I know it sounds painless, right? :)



DISCLAIMER: Sorry for typo's, sentence fragments, run on sentences and grammatical errors.