Let’s jump right in (for background info please see the “About Me” tab)-

By my count (in the last 3 weeks) I have given myself ~45 shots in the gut, had blood drawn 14 times, had 6 veins collapse, been jabbed 12 times with the

dildocam, and peed on 14 sticks.  And I’ve only cried 4 times.  Once when they told me my follicles were growing too slowly and were likely to be duds, once when we decided to convert my IVF an IUI, later that same night after researching the odds of a successful IUI, and once when I accidentally injected the Follistim into an abdominal muscle.  (Burns like hell – never thought lack of abdominal fat would be something to complain about but there you go.)

After all of that I have one monster follicle that gobbles up all my expensive medicine and houses a hard-boiled, unusable egg, 2 sad small little follicles trying to beg scraps from the monster, and 2 “slow and steady wins the race” follicles on the other side.  None appear to be excellent recruits.  And in this game what you want is eggs – lots of eggs.

Let’s break the IVF game down.  We want a baby which comes from an egg which grows in a follicle.  HOWEVER.  Not every follicle has an egg.  Not every egg is mature when collected. Not every mature egg is of a good quality.  Not every good quality egg fertilizes.  Not every fertilized egg grows into an embryo. Not every embryo is viable.  Not every viable embryo will implant in the uterus.  And not every implantation “sticks”.  So with only 2 or three possible eggs (at best) it seemed best to skip the expensive, invasive IVF egg retrieval and embryo transfer (assuming we would even get that far) and go for an IUI – less expensive, no surgery required, no work missed.  Make me ovulate (with a shot, of course), take his sperm and wash it off to get rid of the deadbeats, and inject that directly into my uterus skipping the whole messy (apparently confusing to sperm) vaginal and cervix bit of the process. We said yes, let’s do that.

I just took what I hope are the last night of the shots (add 3 more to the tally) and will go back to the RE in the morning.  Add 2 more peed on sticks, 1 more blood draw and one more date with the dildocam…  And probably one more cry.