Happiest of Days!

It has been such a long wait!!  Last week I was telling friends how incredibly frustrated I have been and emotionally spent with the whole process already.  It hadn't even begun!!!  There has been so much confusion and wondering and phone calls, but finally today we are on to some exciting stuff.  I had an actual appointment with the fertility clinic again today and we are moving ahead.  

We started with a meeting with the doctor to figure out what we all had to do to start this process.  Not having a period makes life a little complicated for IVF and we discussed several options.  Usually in my case they would put me on birth control for a few weeks to help predict a cycle for me and when we could start the hormones for retrieval.  This is pretty typical, because they want to start you on around day 3 of your period and birth control would help them predict this.  I am sure I have mentioned before how much I hate birth control, but let me just reiterate this, I HATE BIRTH CONTROL.   It makes me a crazy person and it never has gone super well for me emotionally.  I am trying to keep myself and my husband as sane as possible during this all.  haha  

Well, as we talked about this, he remembered that I have PCOS (Poly-cystic Ovarian syndrome).  It causes your body to not ovulate regularly, but the nice thing for IVF is that PCOS causes you to produce more follicles than a normal woman would in a single cycle.  So they say that PCOS patients have some pretty good chances of success with IVF.  This is good news for me because this means I wont have to use BC.  It all sounds a little confusing, Im sorry if I am terrible at explaining it all to you.  The explanation is that it really doesnt matter when you start the drugs on a person with PCOS because they tend to not ovulate anyway, so their cycle is a little irrelevant, and when you start the drugs they respond well and really produce follicles.  So wahoo!!  

The next step was getting my physical done.  Gotta love those.  So, I cannot believe I am allowing this picture to go out into the real world, be forgiving!  hahaha  Here we are getting ready for the physical and my husband as usual playing with things he shouldn't.  

 Gotta love stirrups and the ultrasound wand.  A woman's two favourite things.

After the physical, we headed out for the consent forms for ICSI--which we have decided is best for us to do---I will do a blog post later about that.  Maybe on the day of ICSI.  We then talked to the nurse about the drugs I will be taking.  We will probably be starting my baseline next week!!  (The baseline is an ultrasound and blood work to just make sure that your cycle is at the proper place to begin the drugs and your hormones are not too out of whack)  I cannot even believe it.  So, as soon as these drugs arrive, I will post pictures of my injections, what drugs I am taking, and what all these things mean.  

Its just so exciting.  I could have little embryos in the matter of a couple weeks and we couldn't be happier!  Big shout out to our surrogate!  She has been such a dream and waits so patiently for all of this to happen.  Her needles are much bigger than mine, so I will try not to complain!!  I will also make sure she takes some pictures of her needle journey for the blog as well.  It is a very good day!