And so it goes . . .

So we got the official plan today, and it has turned out to be exactly what I expected with one big change. There were signatures, gowns, needles, discussions of Noah, octomom jokes, awkward men in the waiting room, etc. Typical. Familiar.

Things started off as we expected. A class about what medications we would have to get, how to give injections, a nice drawing of my butt separated into quandrants, several vials of blood drawn, etc. Here is the rundown--


(1) five days of birth control with Lurpon shots (1x daily into my stomach)
(2) Continue Lupron until my cycle starts
(3) Start estrogen patches on 3/28 with lower dose of Lupron
(4) Go in for blood draw after 5 days of the patch
(5) Start antibiotic and progesterone shots into quadrant one of my butt 2x a day, three days before transfer
(6) Target transfer date--April 15 (just realized that was tax day)
(7) Inject progesterone into butt-quadrant one 2x a day until pregnancy test
(8) Continue with progesterone injections depending on results of test


I had the 3D sonogram as well and determined two things:

(1) My ovaries are machines--the doctor was surprised at how many eggs were visible

(2) I have polyps in my uterus that have to be removed before I can progress with #1 above. The removal will occur on Wednesday. Joy, joy. It will be a lot like the retrieval process from the last IVF cycle, which I thought I would get to avoid this time around. Oh, well. I'm actually very gald that we know so that the embryo(s) have plenty of good space to attach and grow. I wonder how many people struggle with infertility and just don't know that they have these polyps preventing implantation. Thank God we know.

We talked about all the scenarios of what could happen when the embryos thawed and how many embryos they would put back. We are thawing to get at least two. We have two canes: one cane has a 7-cell, a 6-cell, and a 5-cell. The other cane has 3 5-cell embryos. They are going to thaw the cane that has the 7-6-5 combo first. If only one survives, they will thaw the 5-5-5 combo. We didn't get a clear answer on whether or not they would implant more than three, but our understanding is that they would have to if it came to that.

It's all very sciency and medical right now. And I imagine this will be the case for a while. I feel like it's a game of numbers that I get sucked into. I imagine it's rather romantic to get pregnant au nauturale. I guess this has an element of romance to it . . . I just have to look for it.