Another One Bites the Dust

April 5

I’ve been up since 6 this morning. It’s not even 8:30 now, but nobody is online, not even my mom. Thank God for Andrés and Lucas, or I’d be going crazy right about now.

It’s amazing how peaceful a sunny Saturday morning in spring can be, barely any noise or traffic, just a few people out walking dogs or running to a yoga class. Nice. In contrast, the IVF clinic was packed with women doing cycle monitoring. Sounds like a spinning class, doesn’t it? These ladies get up at dawn each day and get their blood work and ultrasounds done to see when they’re “ready”. When they are, their faithful partners pony up the goods and away they go. There’s no retrieval of eggs or injecting a single sperm into an ovule to fertilize. They get inseminated with a glorified turkey baster. In vivo fertilization. Their sign up sheet for ultrasound is very long in contrast with the IVF one, so they give us IVFers priority. The blood lab is shared by all patients though, so on a packed morning like today, you can be waiting forever to get jabbed. My ultrasound happened before my blood work today – a first.

The tech and I chatted and I briefed her on what stage of the process I was at. I told her to look closely at the right side, since we knew the left was doing fine. She did and then said, “You know often it’s the quality and not the quantity that matters.” “Yeah,” I said, “but Dr. Laskin won’t put me through retrieval without a minimum of 5 or 6 eggs.” “Oh, honey,” she said, feeling for me, “I can’t make things up, unfortunately. I don’t think you even have four...” And that was that. The nurse confirmed the findings, asked me if we wanted to do the retrieval with the three we had. I said I didn’t think so. Besides, even if we did say yes, my INR is so high right now, that Dr. Laskin would consider me at risk of bleeding post retrieval and not want to do it anyway. The risk/return ratio is too far off whack.

It sucks. It truly does. There is so much at risk here. Health wise, here I am taking hormones that have a potential to produce clots when I can produce them quite easily on my own, thank you very much. To counteract their clotting effects, I’m on blood thinners. But then the procedure to retrieve the eggs has a risk of bleeding, so before the retrieval I have to go off blood thinners and this takes time. On top of all that, I have to top up my platelets, so I’m also on steroids. In all, I pop 12 pills a night and shoot up with 3 different hormones. The effects are astounding everywhere else other than my ovaries, unfortunately. I have grown whiskers and nose hair. I have grown a tire around my waist. I have grown bald. I have grown batty. I guess I’m not painting a pretty picture here, and in an effort to partially delete the image of me you now have in your heads, I will say that most of these effects (except for the tire and the battiness) are practically imperceptible to those of you who live outside my body. A sorry attempt at humour.

Timing-wise, it is tricky too. Imagine how hard it is to coordinate with one’s husband, and now add another couple, another family to the mix. Although they agreed to try at least four times in a year, I think we all thought that that meant four embryo transfers, and not that we’d be stuck at the egg-producing stage. At this stage, they’ve started wondering how long this part is going to take, when will Sheona’s cue be, when will they be able to move on with their lives, get married, move to Vancouver? And it’s only April, I know, but each cycle has taken about 2 months, because we’ve had to be “in synch” (hormonally speaking) with each other.

Reading up on the flare cycle, we could technically get started by the end of this month, if my period takes 10 days to arrive like it did after the last cancellation. The flare involves no birth control pill or lupron pre-stimulation. They just stimulate as of day 2 or 3 of the cycle start and when the eggs are of a certain size, they give you lupron to prevent ovulation. But Sheona needs to have a thick lining ready to go when the eggs are ready to be hatched, which begs the question, what if she continues on the estrace and suprefact and waits for me to catch up? Can she? Or will that be too much? I guess the answer to this and the other million and a half questions I have will have to wait for Dr. Laskin’s call. In the meantime, Sheona will take her morning estrace, just in case.