IVF was quite an interesting process and I will just sum it up here. There were lots of needles and appointments in Pleasant Grove at the wonderful Utah Fertility Clinic with Dr. Shawn Gurtcheff. There was a lot of anxiety and some discomfort (80+ shots in the stomach and bum, plus drug reactions).
I reacted very well to the follicle-stimulating hormones that they give you so they can retrieve as many eggs as possible, swelling to the size of a four-month pregnant woman and being placed on serious mobility to restrictions to keep from accidentally rupturing an ovary.
Due to a medication mishap early in the process, we ended up being five days ahead of all the other couples in our group so when it came time to retrieve the eggs (which we did a day ahead of our new schedule because I had so many large ones already) there was no anesthesiologist available so I had to go through the process with just a Valium. It was not fun but mercifully it was short; only about five minutes.
We ended up with 17 eggs but only 8 mature eggs. This is where the anxiety started kicking in since we'd both hoped and kind of expected that we have several embryos and would be able to freeze some for later. Statistically only about half of the mature eggs fertilize and only about a third to half of those end up being viable embryos so you can see why we were a little concerned. It turns out all of them fertilized but some were very, very slow about it. In the end, we ended up with two viable 5-day embryos (our other six stopped growing on day 6) and while it is the clinic's preference to only transfer one embryo at a time, our doctor agreed that given our situation it would be best to transfer both.
Flash forward ten days to the fantastic news that I was at least chemically pregnant. We were thrilled but cautious. We did tell our families since they'd been in on the whole process from the beginning but that was it. There was still a possibility of miscarriage so we didn't let ourselves get too hopefully. Week 7 and our first ultrasound showed one little bean happily floating around with its attached yolk sac and a nice heartbeat. Two weeks later our second ultrasound showed a bit bigger bean with a great heart beat and we officially graduated from the clinic to my regular OB! We were ecstatic, having never made it this far before.
I am now 20 weeks pregnant with a little girl. We couldn't be happier. We had our anatomy scan on Wednesday and it showed that everything is developing perfectly with her. I'm feeling her more and more consistently and we both feel much more secure in the hope that on or around December 6, 2012, we will be bringing home a baby.
From our 16-week ultrasound. She's head down with her
bum in the air, just like I used to do when I was little.
We had the tech put a card (without telling us first) with the gender
in an envelope which I took to my friend Jocelyn, who filled a
cupcake with pink cream that we cut open two days later on
our 5th anniversary in front of family and friends.
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