Uncharted waters

Well my friends, we are officially in uncharted waters.  I triggered last night and am headed to egg retrieval tomorrow!

Before I launch into my usual number roundup, Idiotic Infertility had a couple of interesting posts last week on the topic of sharing stats.  She made the very reasonable point that not everyone appreciates seeing another blogger's numbers.  This is especially true if you're in a bad mental spot, since those numbers could trigger a lot of negative feelings including jealousy and depression.  Ultimately, it all depends on context and understanding how that particular blogger's infertility diagnosis comes into play.

Prior to her posts I'd never even thought twice about sharing my numbers.  For me, as soon as I was diagnosed with Diminished Ovarian Reserve (DOR) I immediately hit the internet for research on what I could expect.  I'm a very analytical person and I really wanted to see what happened to other people with similar hormone levels or antral follicle counts.  Whether their outcomes were good or bad, I wanted to be prepared for every possibility.  And let's face it...no matter what your diagnosis, even if you find 99 stories where people failed, all it takes to keep you going is that one time that somebody like you succeeded.

Anyway, there's obviously more than one way to do things and everyone will have their own opinions and comfort level about how much detail they want to read or share.  I'm going to keep posting numbers because at the end of the day this blog is about helping me to process things.  I hope at the end of it I can be one of those DOR success stories that I was so desperately searching for six months ago, and if not then I hope people can remember that no matter what my numbers say, everyone's body behaves differently and there's also a large component of luck involved.

So without further ado...after 12 full days of stims, I am headed into retrieval with 12 follicles showing on ultrasound.  Four of these are only 10mm and one is 14mm, so the nurse suggested they probably wouldn't be mature enough at retrieval.  But that leaves me with 7 ranging between 16 and 22mm that will hopefully yield some good eggs.  Luckily, lead follicle Fatty McFatterson slowed down enough for the others to catch up, so we won't have to sacrifice him after all.  While 7 mature eggs is certainly a much lower number than I had in mind when I first started IVF treatments last year, over time my expectations have become much more realistic.  As a poor responder with undetectable AMH levels who was worrying as recently as CD10 about being cancelled again, I will be over the moon if they manage to pull mature eggs out of all 7 of those follicles!  My estrogen is currently 8537 (2325 US), for anyone who's counting.

I'm currently flipping back and forth between excitement and oh shit this is really gonna happen nervousness.  I get pretty anxious in the lead-up to any kind of medical procedure, so I really have to try to keep myself busy today and not worry about it too much.  There's some pretty nasty egg retrieval horror stories online, but I've also read a lot of other bloggers who've returned to work the next day with some pretty minimal after-effects, so I'm hoping to fall into the latter category!  I'll try to post something hilarious in my drug-induced stupor tomorrow.

Oh, and I've been nominated for a Liebster Award by not one, not two, but four other awesome bloggers!  As that makes for 44 questions to answer, I'm just going to pick some of the more entertaining/insightful ones and do a post about that next week sometime when I'm (hopefully!) on pins and needles waiting for transfer day.  Thanks for the shout-out, ladies!