This is an anonymous post series following one of our blogger’s ivf journey in real time. You can read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 here.

This (Thursday) morning was my egg retrieval! I was pretty nervous ahead of time since I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I drove the two hours to the clinic with my husband in the passenger seat since I am prone to motion sickness, and the drive involves quite a few winding roads through the hills. I also couldn’t take anything before the procedure for nausea since I couldn’t eat or drink anything ahead of time.

As soon as we arrived there they showed me my recovery area and had me empty my bladder. I met my nurse anesthetist who asked me questions about my medical history to be sure I wouldn’t react to the anesthesia, and then she hooked me up to my IV line. She tried my forearm, but after several tries it had to be placed in my hand. I was really fascinated by the comments on my last post about the different ways that everyone was sedated for their IVF procedure. My fear was that I would still be able to feel what was going on or wouldn’t be out of it enough, so I was glad to hear that at my clinic they really are sure you are ‘out’ for the procedure. I was told that I would be in quite a deep sleep and that the anesthesia that they used would be part sedative, part pain reliever. In the end, not only did I not feel anything, I don’t remember a thing!

When I woke up I was in a the recovery room with the nurse and was in a pretty good mood. The procedure was only 13 minutes, but almost an hour had passed, so it would appear that I was pretty out of it for awhile. The nurse gave me some crackers and ginger ale to help settle my stomach. Apparently I said some pretty silly things because when my nurse got my husband from the waiting room and he asked how I was recovering, she told him I was doing fine and that I was quite a funny lady. I hope she remembers some of it so that I can ask her about it when I return for the transfer! Plus, despite the fact that I never take selifes, there are several selfies on my phone that I definitely don’t remember taking! I asked the nurse about them and she said I took those pictures while recovering. Hopefully I didn’t reveal any deep, dark secrets while I was still out of it!

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While still in the recovery room the pain was similar to period cramps, but as I continue to recover I am definitely having to stay on top of the pain medication. Unfortunately, even though there were 12 follicles found on the ultrasound on Monday, they were only able to retrieve 10 eggs. I was disappointed and asked why that was, and the nurse said that sometimes there aren’t eggs inside what appear to be mature follicles. She assured me that 10 is still a good number and that they were pleased with the result.

After we got on the road, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel so I could eat and get some food in my stomach, and take my first dose of oral pain medication. The nurse said it would be a good idea to focus on protein, water, and electrolytes, so think I had at least 4 glasses of water while we were there. By the time we got back to the car the pain was feeling better, but the drive sure made me feel nauseated and dizzy, so I took one of the Zofran they gave me and thankfully managed to avoid vomiting on the remainder of the drive. Once I got home I set up camp on the couch. I’ve been catching up on my favorite shows, emails and trying to relax as much as possible, but I will admit I have also been working on work emails quite a bit.

I heard from the clinic this afternoon and they said that out of the 10 eggs, only 8 were mature, and they would let me know tomorrow how many eggs were fertilized. I’m disappointed there weren’t more eggs retrieved, but with 8 mature eggs I sure hope at least one of those will turn into a take home baby! If that happens we will be over the moon with excitement! I’m not the most patient person ever, so it will be hard to wait for the updates on how our embryos are doing until the transfer on Tuesday.

After we get the report tomorrow we will only have less than 48 hours to decide for sure whether or not we will do genetic testing on our embryos. The testing costs about $4,000 but can determine if an embryo has one of the most common chromosomal abnormalities that would most likely cause a miscarriage. It seems like this would be a good idea, but $4,000 is also a lot of money! At this point our thought process is that if there are just a few embryos we won’t do genetic testing since the FET to transfer them would cost less. But, if there ends up being more embryos (maybe 5 or more) we would want to do the testing so that we would know which would be the better quality embryos to transfer. It’s a big decision for sure! It’s also interesting that my husband is nervous there will be too many embryos created and I’m nervous that we won’t get enough! Although he would admit he isn’t as well researched as I am since I continue to tell him his fears are quite unfounded.

If you did IVF did you decide to do genetic testing? How many embryos did you end up with?