Previous: Andrea Part 5: Stims
I wrote this on Easter morning (March 31, 2024).
As I sit in our Fertility clinic in Vancouver on Easter Sunday morning (2024), I’m a little scared and a little excited. At this point we’ve done 9 days of injections and this is the first ultrasound that should tell us how many eggs are growing. Obviously a high number is good, but also if it’s too high then my wife child be at risk for many serious complications. It’s almost impossible to know what to hope for.
This scan is also going to most likely tell us what the next step is. When will she need to trigger ovulation? When will we need to be here again to do the egg retrieval? What day do we need to get off work? Do things still look promising or will we need to cancel the cycle for some reason?
This is also the first time we’ll need to pick up more medications from the clinic itself. All our meds so far have been ordered through our local pharmacy and fully 100% covered, which is wild, and we are so grateful for having prescription coverage through work. However, this also means that today we’ll need to buy meds from the clinic and manually put it through insurance and I had a fear of our insurance reviewing it manually, deciding it shouldn’t be covered, and then immediately rescinding everything that had already been paid.
Thankfully, as I was in the middle of writing that sentence, Andrea texted to say the scan was done, and when I went to her, she informed me that the trigger shot would be happening that night. I was glad for the interruption of my finance-related thought spiral.
We went to pay for the trigger shot itself and it only cost $120, which was a pleasant surprise as well.
She was told there were 11 follicles growing well and several other small ones that might reach the right size over the coming 2 days. This was encouraging news. It meant she had good numbers, was healthy, and was not displaying signs of OHSS (Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome) which could put her health in danger in a variety of ways. None of which I wanted to think about.
We were given the new medications and instructions and sent home to enjoy the rest of our Easter Sunday.
Hearing the news that we were triggering for ovulation that same night was surprising but ever so exciting. On the way home I remarked that a future human that doesn’t exist yet might be about to be formed over the next few days. Most people know a general time frame of ovulation but don’t get to know the exact moment that eggs will be ready and sperm will meet them to create embryos. That thought was incredibly exciting and gave me a bit of a buzz. I loved the hope that came with this thought. Was this about to be the beginnings of a child? Children?
About a month later, I would overhear a nurse say, “It just takes time. It’s not magic. It’s medicine.” I absolutely loved that phrase for so many reasons. Sometimes it’s just so amazing how far medicine has come. It’s medicine, it’s science, and while it does feel like magic at times, it’s so important to remember that it’s not. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. We would only have to wait a couple more days to find out how many eggs would be retrieved to see what our next chances would be.
Growing Inside, Shrinking Outside 
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