Update

I've been remiss about updating, at exactly the wrong time, I know! It's just you know how sometimes you just become so overwhelmed with everything you have to fit into your day, and then there's this little IVF elephant in the room, and you just kind of run out of breathing space so you have to focus down onto just doing the bare minimum to survive.

Most of my craziness has been caused by a bitch attorney in another of our offices and her crazy client. I got an email Wednesday morning from her headed "It's 3.14am" which went on to say how she couldn't sleep because she was so stressed that I hadn't been able to complete this project for her client. That she asked us to do on Tuesday. I mean, OK, actually she asked us to do it several weeks ago, and we've been backwards and forwards a bit with questions for the client. Not stellar service, but we kept things ticking along. So on Tuesday we get the word that the project HAD to be completed on Wednesday. Um, yeah, thanks bitch. Perhaps if I didn't have my own stuff where clients are screaming for things, and projects with REAL deadlines, I might have got yours done. Perhaps the fact that we are hiring 5 new people to help us in the next 2 months, and are still recruiting might give you a hint that we are swamped right now. Perhaps if I didn't mind working until 2am and giving up my life I might get it all done, but those days are long over for me because I'm just not prepared to do that any more. The joys of law firm life.

Anyway.

The transfer yesterday went well. Mostly well. I got to the clinic already needing to pee (it's a full bladder procedure, but they want you there one and a quarter hours beforehand). I knew I'd never last until the procedure, so did a quick stealth pee in the public bathrooms on the ground floor of the buildings before going in. But I had a big water bottle with me, and was steadily sipping away as I sat on my bed and we went through all the preliminaries. They told me straight away that I would be transferring all four embryos. I was shocked, because I thought I'd have to battle the doctor over putting more than three in. But then they gave me the grades, and I had a 4-cell grade 1, a 5-cell grade 2, a 4-cell grade 2 and a 4-cell grade 4. The ideal would have been an 8-cell grade 1. So they were a bit sluggish, and that grade 4 probably isn't going to do anything for me, so that's presumably why they decided to just throw them all in and see what sticks. They also decided to do assisted hatching (cutting a small hole in the outer membrane), but I've yet to find out how much THAT will cost me as I didn't prepay for it.

I'd paid a small fortune for the privilege of having my acupuncturist come to the clinic, so she did a half-hour acu session while I was lying there enjoying the effects of the valium that we are given prior to transfer. And I kept sipping on my water bottle like a good girl. By the time she finished, my bladder was getting painfully full. My appointment time came and went. We asked the nurse how long it was going to be, because I was starting to feel like I'd burst, and she broke the bad news that not only was the doctor running slightly late, they'd changed the schedule and I wasn't going to be the first transfer of the day after all, but the second one. However, I think she could see that I was near to tears, so she let me go to the bathroom with instructions to pee out a cup full of urine. Yeah right. Have you ever tried to limit your pee to just a cup full when you've been completely desperate to go? I think I kept it down to about 3 cups before I could finally cut off the flow. So, given that I'd peed more than I should have done, I went back to the water bottle.

By the time I got into the procedure room, my bladder was painfully full again, and the nurse and doctor both exclaimed about how huge and full my bladder looked. I asked if they wouldn't press down too hard with the transabdominal ultrasound head, and the doctor said "yeah, because then I'll be paying the price, won't I?". I assumed that he had in fact been peed on before. He had to clean out a lot of progesterone gunk before the transfer, and remarked that he could always tell who was on vaginal progesterone. Nice. He said they definitely make it sticky to stay in there for a reason, but it takes a while to take it out again. I got the obligatory multiples and selective reduction talk, and when I said that I thought the grade 4 wouldn't exactly be doing anything, he surprised me by saying he'd had a patient have triplets from 4-cell grade 5's. I didn't even know the grading scale went as low as grade 5! So that gave me hope -not that I want triplets or quads, but I want 1 or 2 of my little sluggish guys to thrive and stick. They put the embryos in, which was all a little painful because speculum + full bladder does not a comfortable Sarah make.

As soon as we were done, the nurse brought me a bedpan. Right in the procedure room. With the doctor still there messing around on the computer. So it was a little hard to let go, but then I remembered how much it hurt so I managed it.

I was trundled back to the recovery area, had another acupuncture session, and waited out my hour of bedrest. One of my lovely internet buddies who goes to the clinic stopped to say hi, and it turned out that she was the reason I was rescheduled, as she was doing a 6-day transfer and two of her blastocysts were already hatching so they needed to get her transfer done ASAP. So I forgave her causing me that discomfort!

My aunt, who'd kindly driven me to the clinic, and I went home and hung around until about 3pm when she left, and I crawled into bed pretty quickly. I got out of bed at 9.20pm purely because I had to have more drugs, and this time with food, even though I wasn't hungry, but I could easily have just stayed in bed for the duration. I guess valium really knocks me for six. That and the double dose of progesterone. However, getting up wasn't all bad, as I got to see who was eliminated from So You Think You Can Dance, and I was glad to see that America got it right this week, so all was not lost for the world.

This morning I am back at work, back to more emails from the crazy bitch attorney and trying to stay as mellow as I can. The good news is that I was brave enough to step on the scale, and I've lost three pounds since Monday, so some of the stims bloat is going down. The weekend will involve as much napping as is physically possible, in an effort to allow those embryos space and time to get comfy and grow big and strong. God, I hope it works this time!