An Emotional Roller Coaster

Wow, this week (only 3 days in) has been one emotional roller coaster that I certainly was not expecting!

Let's start with Sunday morning. I had an ultrasound (Day 13) to take a look at my ovaries to see how they were looking. Well the nurse starts on my right ovary, there are so many follicles in there, so she begins counting and measuring. After about 10 minutes of looking around on the right side, she goes to my left side, there are probably just as many on my left side. After another 10 minutes, and multiple pictures later, we are done with the ultrasound. I didn't get an exact count on how many follicles I have but it's easy from 15-20, ranging in all different sizes. Lately, I've had at most 5-6 follicles total. The one other time I had a lot of follicles, the doctor made the call to cancel my cycle to avoid Hyperstimulation. I feared this would happen again this cycle, but would have to wait and hear what my instructions were on the nightly tape (which I can listen to usually after 4:30 pm). The tape indicated to stop taking the Follistim and to come in Monday morning for bloodwork and ultrasound.

To move onto Monday morning, my ultrasound was scheduled to be at 7:15 am. I got called back by my "favorite" nurse (not really) because I forgot to ask for someone else. She begins looking at my ovaries via ultrasound. She is astonished at how many follicles I have, she saw I had many in my paperwork, but definitely was a shocker seeing it for herself. This ultrasound was very uncomfortable as it lasted about 30 minutes between the two sides. My ovaries are already feeling "full" and the added pressure does not help. In case you didn't know, all of my ultrasounds are done vaginally. So yeah, 30 minutes...not so pleasant! While in there, she takes lots of pictures of all the Follicles and doesn't even measure them, she's just concentrating on getting pictures of all of them. So when we're done, I go get my bloodwork done and wait to meet with the Doctor. It's usually not good when you have to meet with the Doctor at the spur of the moment. While I'm waiting, she's manually measuring the follicles from the pictures she's printed. I have a couple large follicles and the rest of them are smaller but growing.

Dr. Sullivan comes into the room and tells me that we basically have two options, pending where my estrogen level is at, which I'd know later in the day when the bloodwork results came back in. My two options were to stop the cycle because of too many follicles, or the other option was to convert this cycle to an IVF cycle. Since IVF is my next route anyways, we decided we'd go ahead with the IVF cycle as long as my estrogen level looks good. Around Noon I got a phone call from the IVF nurse, Kathy. She said we can go ahead with the IVF cycle. At this point, I'm excited but nervous at the same time, it was hard to wrap my head around all of a sudden doing IVF. Anyways, she explains that I'll need to take Follistim again that night and a new injectable drug called Ganirelix which even after reading about I'm still not 100% sure what it does. Unfortunately, I could not find this drug anywhere in our area, so I'd need to pick it up at the Doctors office in Snyder. So I called up my Dad to see if he could drive up there to get it for me, what a huge weight off my shoulders it was for him to go get that for me! Kathy continued to say that I would need to come up Tuesday morning for bloodwork and an ultrasound performed by Dr. Sullivan himself. So at this point, I'm excited about doing IVF right now and doing something unexpected at the time, hoping maybe it was a "sign" or something...

Tuesday morning, Casey goes up to the doctors with me. I walked in and had my bloodwork then went back for my Ultrasound. Dr. Sullivan started on my left ovary and started measuring. He sees lots of follicles, but noticed they didn't grow like he was expecting. Since they had me stop taking my Follistim Sunday night, that possibly backtracked me. When it was stopped, that was because my estrogen was high and IVF wasn't in the picture at that point. He continued onto the right side and saw the same thing, lots of follicles but not the expected growth. So now I'm bummed. I was all geared up to do IVF this week, and now everything this cycle might have been for nothing. All the shots, medications, bloodwork, trips to Buffalo, the emotional exhaustion...possibly could have gotten me absolutely no where. However, I do have to wait on the results of my Estrogen to see how that looks. If it's where they want, they'll look at me again tomorrow and make a decision. If it's dropped then the cycle comes to a halt and wait for the next cycle to begin...so I'm sitting here crossing my fingers, toes, legs, arms waiting for a phone call...

Welp, I just got the phone call from Kathy that we won't go forward with this cycle. I feel crushed. I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. I'm not mad, I know it's for the right reason, I'm sad and emotionally exhausted. I know I have good things to look forward to though. We are having our IVF consultation on Thursday afternoon as planned. I'll learn more about it and what they do and get prepared for the next cycle. So I'll definitely have something new to look forward to. I'll still take the Ovidrel shot on Thursday evening to push my body into Ovulation so we can move forward. So that's what's happened the last 3 days. I'm spent. I cannot wait for our Vegas vacation!! I need it more than ever. Counting down, only 11 more days until we're there!! :-)