"Follicles of a Donor"

This statement is the equivalent to body of a 20 year old! Ultrasound went very well today. My doctor reports that my follicles are more like what they see in their 20 year old egg donor patients!

I am on a fairly low dose of the medications and rather than having 6 mm follicles all of mine are about 8-12 mm! There are about 6-7 good sized ones on each side and several smaller ones that may or may not actually do anything. All of the good sized follicles are about the same size which is very good.

So, I am way ahead of the curve and may move up our extraction date a little bit. We may now be looking at extraction more like Memorial Day or the day after instead of Wednesday or Thursday!

Our next step is ultrasound on Thursday and Saturday to make more possible adjustments to the dose of meds and then they tell me when to give myself the trigger shot.

The trigger shot is the shot that tells the ovaries to release the many eggs in a usable form. Then they go in 30 hours after the shot and suck out all of the fluid which includes several eggs on each side before they are release to the Fallopian Tubes. This is done under anesthesia with a large needle directly into the ovaries via the back wall of the vagina. Sounds like fun? You wanna sign up too?

Five days later 2 embryos are carefully selected to be placed back in. We won't know if they are boy embryos or girl embryos and due to our low risk of genetic malformations, we will not be doing the very expensive pre-implantation genetics testing. They then do a blood test about two weeks later to see if the embryos behaved and stayed where they were supposed to and started growing.

So, the scary thing is we could end up with one to up to four embryos! They don't like the 4 babies so much so they try to chose so that only 1-2 will take off. Twins wouldn't be so bad. If this is how we have to get pregnant, the fewer times the better.

More to come on Thursday.