I’m in the middle of week two of my IVF journey. Last Monday I started stims without really diving into what was coming next or how this whole process would go. I was focused on starting, not on everything after.
This week I’m still on stims and hoping to be done by Friday. Physically, I feel like I got punched in the gut and the feeling doesn’t want to go away. The meds have made me super tired. I sleep most of the day, and my energy feels completely drained.
I’ve had a lot more questions this week about what comes next. I’ve learned that even if you retrieve a good number of follicles, it doesn’t mean they all make it through the next phases. There’s the maturity check, fertilization, early embryo development, the blastocyst stage, and sometimes genetic testing. At every step, the numbers can drop.
The goal is to end up with at least one good embryo. That’s the hope. But I turn 34 next month, and I can’t help wondering if I should already be thinking about a second round to bank more eggs for the future. Right now I don’t have the answers. I guess only time will tell.
This process has so many variables that it’s hard not to think ahead and try to predict where this path leads. IVF feels like a mix of hope and realism. You hope to be one of the lucky ones, but you also try to prepare yourself in case things don’t go the way you planned.
For now, I’m taking it one week at a time and trying to focus on getting through this stage.
Later note about this week: my estradiol is over 6000, close to 7k.. and I have around 20 follicles per ovary. My clinic confirmed my egg retrieval will be this Saturday. I was really hoping for Friday because I’m over the jug-of-fluid feeling in my stomach and the constant fatigue. At this point I just feel physically maxed out.
Because I’m at a higher risk for OHSS, my doctors lowered my nightly Gonal dose and prescribed Dostinex to help reduce that risk. The good news. THURSDAY is the last day of all these stim meds! Once I take the trigger shot to tonight, I am done with the shots 🙂
The good thing is that I already planned to freeze all of my eggs. With my estrogen response being this high, I’ll need to let my body rebalance hormonally before scheduling implantation/attempt pregnancy.
Apparently when estrogen levels are elevated like this, the chances of holding a pregnancy are lower, and clinics prefer to wait until the next cycle. It’s safer and gives the body more time to reset.
So even though the delay isn’t what I originally imagined, it’s part of protecting the outcome long term. Right now the focus is getting through retrieval safely and letting my body recover.
One step at a time.
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