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NO! You can't be in mourning yet! You test next week! Some people (I've read on the Internet) get really bad cramping all throughout their 2WW!) Just don't think anything at all (good or bad) about the outcome until it's there. My husband goes off the deep end trying to be so positive that it kinda makes me mad. He's already named them, etc., and I"m like: "It's not even confirmed!!" But anyway, my tack is to go to the library and read books NOT about babies (I've just completed my third book in these past 7 days!). It really makes the hours go by and takes your mind completely off the 2WW.
Okay, onto IVF if you want to plan ahead. (By the way, I've already lined up donors for donor eggs, so I'm planning ahead, too. It's comforting.)
Absolutely NOT painful. For about 2 weeks, the moment you get your first (regular) period, you take birth control pills. Then you go for ultrasound and blood test to see if your levels are all good and if your ovaries are all in the sleep mode. Then they start you on lupron, a teeny shot with a teeny amount of fluid. This goes on for a week. Every night a teeny shot that gives you zero symptoms (believe me, I've done this -- having been a donor 4 times in my life and doing 2 IVFs myself -- a hundred times, never with any drug side effects at all.)
Then you go back for another ultrasound so they can check that you're on track, and they start you on follistim and menoput, one in morning, one in pm. These are also tiny shots each, no pain, it's really no big deal at all. This goes on for about a week. You go in for another ultrasound to see how many follicles are waking up and they change or keep your meds the same.
Then -- only about 3 weeks after you started your period, or less -- they tell you exactly what night to give yourself a (long) HcG shot in the butt (DH must do this), and then 36 hours later you go in for retrieval.
Retrieval day must be a day off because you're just groggy and tired. It's surgery without the pain. You go in, they wash you up, they give you IV to knock you out, and in 1 hour you are awake (groggy) and DH drives you home to pamper you the rest of the day. You are tired but feel NO pain whatsoever. Oh, forgot to say that the moment they start giving you the groggy juice, they politely take your DH away so he can give a sperm sample. The moment they retrieve the eggs, they wash them and then either put them in the cultivating dish with the sperm OR they do ICSI on each egg (like we did), which is where they inject each egg with a single sperm to make sure they get in there. They tell you before you go how many eggs they retrieved from you.
Then, the next day the doctors call you to tell you how many eggs fertilized overnight. That and how mature (or immature) each egg was is basically all they can tell you at this point. The eggs are safely in the lab getting cultivated and on day 3 they look at the eggs again and give you a call. The reason they check again on day 3 is that that's the day when finally the DNA of the sperm kicks in. Eggs can be fine on day 1 and 2 but if they halt in growth or never make it past day 3, there's something seriously wrong with the sperm.
So, they call you and let you know the grading of the embryos, and let you know how many (if any) they can culture to blast.... which is day 5. Some ladies get called in at day 3 because you have to have at least 6 good eggs to try to cultivate to blast because of the high rate of attrition during this process. (Turns out embies really want to be inside mommie and all this test-tube stuff isn't really for them.)
So, hopefully the embies can go to day 5 when they are called a blastocyst (blast) which is when the lab can see the set of cells which have made their way to make the placenta, and the set of cells which have made it to become the inner mass (which is the baby and the umbillical cord). And so they grade each embryo with a 1-5 and an ABCD. So, an example rating of a good blast would be 5AA or 4AA, etc. (We put in 3 4AAs.) [See Dr. Smith's forum on all the good reasons to culture to blast.]
So, then, on day 5 you go in in the morning, they put your feet up, wash you up, show you the lab photos of the blasts that they are transferrring (they talk to you about it over the phone so you are well informed), and then the doctor comes in with his long turkey baster and inserts the eggs all at once. Zero pain, you're wide awake. You feel absolutely nothing. (If it's your first time, you will have gone through a trial transfer like 2 weeks ago just so the doctor can tell how long of a tube he needs to put in you to hit the back of your uterus.)
Ater that, put your legs down, you shake hands, and they give you a valium (DH says its to make you sleep all day because 48 hours bedrest is what they demand at this point so eggs can implant), and you walk to your car and go home and start your 2WW.
It's very simple, the time flies, and the whole thing takes about 3 weeks. If you'd like to email me about it please do! [email protected]
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