Nerves

Tomorrow is our egg retrieval and I am totally ready and not ready all at the same time. I feel super gross: bloated, sore, gross metallic taste in my mouth constantly from the antibiotics, bruised from blood draws and stomach shots (Mike went two for four for hitting blood vessels with Sunday's shots). So I am ready to feel better (especially the metallic taste needs to GO AWAY ... blech!). But I'm also super nervous. How many eggs will they get? How many will fertilize? What if I end up having low quality eggs? How will I feel after the procedure? What if I get OHSS? This is what will keep me up tonight. In the end, though, I know it's out of my control. I just have to hope and pray for the best.

The game plan for tomorrow is to leave at 6:00 am to arrive at the doctor's office at 6:30. Mike makes his contribution at 6:40ish then I go back at 7:00 with the surgery scheduled at 8:00. The doctor will aspirate all follicles greater than 18mm or so and then an embryologist immediately looks under a microscope to see if there is an egg or not. I think we should know by the time we leave how many eggs they managed to get. They said the procedure itself is pretty fast (15-20 minutes), but I have to recover from the anesthesia which takes about an hour. Fingers crossed we are home and relaxing by 10!

After the procedure, each mature egg will be injected with sperm via ICSI and then we wait to see whether they grow or not. Hopefully, there are several that fertilize and are growing at the expected rate. The quantity and quality of the embryos will determine when and how many embryos we transfer (1 or 2). The transfer will be sometime between Friday and Monday if all goes as planned. Any extra embryos are frozen for future use.

So that's the plan. I find that if I focus on the plan and what is the immediate next step, sometimes I can stop my mind from diving into "what if?" rabbit holes ... sometimes. We'll see if I can do that tonight!