Insert clever retrieval title here

I won't make those of you with busy lives wait until the end of this post.  We got 7 eggs.  My RE is hopeful that 5 of those will be mature.

And I cried on the retrieval table.  Again.

My emotionless resolve started to break somewhere around noon yesterday.  I was at work, and I was bored because I wasn't very busy, and I started getting anxious.  My stomach worked itself into a ball of knots.  Then I got home and had things to do and I felt OK again.  I walked Buddy.  I ran to Target to pick up a gift to mail to my niece for her birthday.  I also got some lightbulbs, the non-energy efficient kind.  Normally I try to be as nice to Mother Earth as possible, but on the weekend I had bought a new lamp for our living room and installed some of those high-efficiency CFL lights and absolutely hated them.  Instead of being warm and homey, the light these bulbs gave off was cold and stark.  It make our living room feel like a lab.  So I decided to swap them out for some normal incandescents, and in taking out the CFL bulbs I accidentally broke one.

M freaked out.  Apparently CFLs contain mercury and there are very specific instructions on how to clean up when you break one, involving scary things like airing the room out for 15 minutes, using rubber gloves, and putting all of the particles in a freezer bag to prevent any more mercury vapour from being released.  None of which I knew anything about, so M's reaction kind of pushed me over the edge.  I felt stupid and terrible and worried.  Like I couldn't do anything right, even change a fucking lightbulb, let alone make a goddamn baby.

By the time we went to bed, I was pretty much feeling ALL THE FEELS that I'd been shunting away all week.  The fear that we'll get yet another shitty crop of eggs.  The guilt for putting us through this.  A heaping dose of self-pity.  And some new unpleasantness: the grief of saying goodbye to my chances of ever having my own biological child.  Because, my friends, I'm pretty sure this is it.  Whatever happens this week, I am as close to certain as I can be right now that this will be our last egg retrieval. While I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong, I'm pretty sure my eggs (no matter how many of them there are) just aren't going to cut it.

We got up at the ungodly hour of 5:30am to be at the clinic for our 7:00 retrieval.  It was dark and muggy when we got into the car.  There was no traffic and we arrived even before most of the clinic staff, so we sat in the waiting room all alone until a few of the nurses finally arrived to prep me.  Then, a needle-phobe's worst nightmare: the nurse screwed up the IV she was putting into my arm.  She fidgeted.  She poked.  She prodded.  Then she took the fucking thing out and started all over on the other side.  Between my needle phobia and the residual bad feelings of the night before, by the time she was done I was already fighting back tears.

Then, the retrieval.  My RE asked how I'd been doing and I told her honestly that I was disappointed with how few eggs we'd be getting this time.  She was understanding but said that there was no guarantee any other month would be better, so we just had to hope for quality.  Then she asked whether I had been comfortable the first time during retrieval, and I told her no.  They decided to give me more drugs than before.  Which helped a little, but there was still pain.  Damn my right ovary for being uncooperative.  But just like last time, right when it seemed that the pain was getting too much, it was over.

They told us they got seven eggs.  I should have been happy, but all I could think was that they won't all be mature and they won't all fertilize.  I just felt hopeless.

My RE asked if I was ok.  And I wanted to say yes because physically I was but emotionally, I was so very not.  So like a big fucking baby, I started to cry.  And she put her hand on my shoulder and told me it was ok, that she knew how overwhelming it all was.  I just cried harder.

 Honestly, I liked it better the other way.