Day One

Since I'm opening up a little more about our fertility journey, I wanted to share that Jer and I began our IVF cycle yesterday. Tomorrow morning being CD3 (cycle day 3), as we call it in the infertility world, I will wake up bright and early and head to the downtown office for my base ultrasound (this is the fun one where I have to drink a litre of water for an external ultrasound and have an internal ultrasound afterwards..that's right - the infamous dildo cam!) and blood test. Around 2pm there will be a message in my inbox with my results and further instructions. This is how the cycle monitoring bit works. The stick and poke part feels a bit like hearding cattle. They open the doors at 7am with a line already gathering outside, and in we go. We even get numbers!

This morning a close friend asked how IVF went, so I thought I should explain that an IVF cycle is actually two months long. The first month begins with a round of birth control pills. It seems so counter-intuitive to begin this way, but these specialists have to gain complete control of my ovaries before they can pump me full of hormones to make me begin to release 20 eggs in one month instead of the usual one egg. Because of my low AMH levels it will probably be a lot lower than 20, but we're hoping for more than 5 or else our cycle will be cancelled.

With any luck, at the end of it we'll have a few of these..

photo swiped from wikipedia

oocytes, or as I like to call them, potential babies. One or two go back in and if it works, 9 months later we get our baby! It sounds easy enough, but I'm leaving out the hard stuff like the heafty bill, the crazy hormonal person I will become, and the terrifying reality of having a giant needle stuck into my ovaries to suck out all those eggs. Eek! I do get sedated, but I'm almost more nervous about that than the what I imagine to be searing pain part. It'll totally be worth it though, right?

Reading over all of this, I realize that we sound almost insane for doing this, especially since there are other options out there that avoid all the medications and egg sucking with giant needles. We are not going into this lightly of course. At this point, after weighing all our options, we've decided that this is the best option for us. We have received a lot of criticism over it (which is part of the inspiration for that 'what not to say' post I'm working on), but at the end of the day we're the ones that have to live with it. So here we go!