This is the fifth installment in a short series (which may become an occasional series) about baby making.
So onward to the injectibles.
My wife is pretty awesome with these. Seriously, she just swabs and grabs a spot and sticks the thing in. Much less stress than the one time I triggered myself. Luckily, since she's on pretty low level meds in the world of injectible fertility meds (low dose and only one drug at a time), she gets to use these super tiny needles and doesn't seem to have a lot of reaction to them. Well, no swelling, itchiness, etc. After a couple of days you can totally see little holes where the needles went in. And the bloat...lets just say its probably a good thing this development wasn't in July. You really couldn't take these things and wear a bathing suit without people making assumptions. It was bad enough that the poor woman couldn't comfortably work out.
And then there's the other issue. Even on this pretty low dose, she overresponded. But not really. She overresponded in those damned ovaries producing a jumble of follicles, but of crappy size. I suppose this is a step in the right direction compared to the oral medication response, but a bunch of little follicles is useless, and a bunch of big follicles are only good if you're doing IVF (in-vitro fertilization, a procedure which is invasive and incredibly expensive, and not on our plate right now). So up and down the meds went, in an effort to get her to produce a couple of follicles big enough to inseminate. And up and up and up the estrogen levels went. High. Over 2000. I have no idea what is normal, but it was clear that was not.
So as her levels continues to soar, the doctors decided it was time to trigger the two almost decent follicles we had and hope the others didn't catch up. And before agreeing to do this, and the insemination, they asked if we are ok with selective reduction, which we had to say yes to if we wanted to move forward. See, the issue with inseminating like this, even with just two almost-ok-sized follicles and some small ones is there is always the chance one of those 12 small ones will catch up in the 48 hours between the last ultrasound, the trigger, and the IUI. And we all know how Jon and Kate turned out (they ignored directions not to have sex due to the hyper-stimulation, if I recall correctly). While you occasionally hear about it, it is next to impossible to carry, say, 6 babies safely and certainly impossible to carry them to term. I'll discuss this more another day, but we did move forward.
After the trigger and IUI, Princess Charming was bloated. Like carrying a small ship in the belly bloated. While she never had the official OHSS (Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome) diagnosis, and didn't need (yikes) draining or anything, she definitely had a mild case.
And then a chemical pregnancy. Betas of 57, 83, and 26 at 14, 16 and 18 dpiui. Well boo.
We have decided her body decided there was too much going on with those ovaries and needed to sit out that round.
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