Super Woman...

Whenever you picture me in your mind from here on out...I'd better be wearing a Super Woman cape. My injections are over. Let me say that one more time: My injections...are over. Damn it all to hell that felt good!!

I had my last injection this evening. It was an intramuscular injection just below my hip bone with an inch and a half needle. You won't believe this...but it didn't hurt. Like at all. I don't know, maybe my pain tolerance has gone up. Maybe I'm numb from all the shots. Maybe because it was basically in my rear-end...and I have more cushion there. Or maybe it was because I'm USED to injections upon injections in my tummy in my 3-week old bruises. I gotta tell ya, I was expecting LOTS of pain...the doctor was explaining to us earlier today how to give the shot (he even drew a great big "X" on me so we'd know where to do it). He said (and I quote): "If you hit bone, don't worry about it." WTF? Who says that in front of ME hours before I'm possibly about to be stabbed in the hipbone? My god, this man has just never "gotten" my fear of needles and my ridiculously vivid imagination. All I could picture in my mind seconds before the shot was bone fragments floating around inside me. It wasn't pretty. J was a nervous wreck. No, wait...disaster....leading up to him giving me this shot. But he got that sucker in there and I said..."HOLY CRAP...that doesn't hurt at all!". I was kind of cracking up while it was happening. Which isn't good...I think I might've moved a little from the laughing...it's getting sore.

I've had bloodwork and ultrasounds everyday for the last 6 days (skipped Turkey Day). My arms are blue from the bloodwork. I can NOT stand having blood done. It's not that it hurts, it's just that I can't even stand to be touched in the crook of my arm. It really freaks me out. Of course after 6 days of blood...and my veins collapsing almost every single day (that's an average of 3 pokes a day), I am blue, purple and green...and yesterday I was NOT a good patient. The nurse basically held me down while the (not so gentle) doctor had to take the blood. I cried, I flailed - looking back on it, I should be embarassed. But after 3 and half weeks of needles...screw everybody...I should be allowed a tantrum. After all the trauma, the nurse said they could take blood out of my hand today. Why don't they tell you that crap ahead of time??? This morning, they did blood from the top of my hand. It didn't hurt at all. There was no tantrum. It lasted 10 seconds and it was over. Grant it, it's sore now and a little blue, but my GOD why couldn't they do that the first time around? So tomorrow, I have my last blood draw. I think I'm going to have them do it in my sore hand that they did today. That way they have a nice fresh hand to do my IV for my egg harvesting on Tuesday.

SO TUESDAY IS THE BIG DAY!!!!!!!!!! I have my procedure at 4:00. IN THE MORNING. How crazy is that? We have to be there at 3:30am. At the beginning of this IVF cycle, there were 9 couples doing it. Two couples dropped out in the very beginning. Two couples were told today that they didn't have enough eggs to complete the cycle (my god, how depressing would it have been to make it all the way through all this...get to the end and be told you can't do it...I feel for them). So there's now 5 couples that will be finishing IVF. Two women are being harvested on Monday....Three of us on Tuesday. I'm actually the SECOND procedure on Tuesday...the first lady goes under at 3am. It's almost like I get to sleep in.

The doc told me that I have approximately 12 eggs. He was torn between doing the harvesting on Tuesday or Wednesday. He said on Tuesday I'm going to have a couple eggs that aren't "ripe" enough yet, but if we wait until Wednesday some of my eggs will be TOO ripe and won't be any good. But if we do it on Tuesday, there's the possibility that some of the "unripe" eggs MAY ripen in the lab. So Tuesday is our best bet. He said they don't usually get all the eggs - sometimes they just miss them, or they can't get to them...whatever. So I'm hopefully looking at around 9 eggs that they'll get and will hopefully be good.

The harvesting will take approximately 20-30 minutes. They do an abdominal ultrasound while they're putting a needle in me so they can see where they need to go to get the eggies. I will be under anesthsia the whole time and won't remember anything.

The doc says that on either Wednesday or Thursday I'm going to be in a good deal of pain. Between this injection I got tonight (this was the drug that tells my body to go crazy) and just the being poked with a needle, my ovaries are going to swell WAY up. This is when we'll tell if I go into hyperstimulation or not. Phew...scary. But I've reacted really well to all the drugs so far, so I'm thinking that I'm going to be ok. I'm told the pain is going to last at a minimum for a week.

Once I come home from the doc on Tuesday, I start on 5 drugs (all pills or creams...YAY!). One to help get the extra fluids out of my body, an antibiotic so I don't get an infection from the procedure, baby aspirin (which apparently helps in implantation!), progesterone pill, and a progesterone cream which will all help thicken the lining of my uterus and help the embros hold on. All the drugs I've been on up until this point have thinned out my uterus, so I'm high-risk for either them not taking...or miscarriage in my first trimester. If this does work and I get pregnant, I've got stay on the progesterone for 12 weeks.

The implantation of the bee-bees will either take place on Friday or Sunday. I'm sooooooo excited that it's not Saturday. I know this is completely stupid, but Jeffrey's Christmas party for work is Saturday night and it's been my one thing to look forward to in all this. Of course by Saturday, I might be feeling like hell and may not go...but the fact that I CAN go if I want makes me freakin' giddy as hell. I bought a dress for it 2 months ago....I'm THAT excited about it. If the implantation is Friday...that means we can even spend the night. I just need a light at the end of the tunnel and this has been it for me.

Ok - so that's the latest. The only thing I have tomorrow is a blood draw....I'm not allowed to eat after 5pm tomorrow...and at 4am on Tuesday....I'm on my way to this being over.

Oh - weird thing and then I'm done, I swear. This injection I got a tonight is the pregnancy hormone which causes a home preg test to go positive. Even though they haven't even fertilized my eggs yet - if I were to take a test right now...it would be flamingly positive. I kind of want to take one just for the excitement of it all. The bummer is...I have one more blood draw in my near future. They'll be taking blood in about 3 weeks from today for my preg-test.