It is my 30th birthday. A Saturday. I haven’t slept that well (no surprise there). I have a medication centre set up in my dining room. I have boxes of medications, needles, alcohol swabs, and treats for after. Our drink fridge is now also a medication fridge and it is from there that I take my first box.

We had picked up the medications the week before from the pharmacy. When the prescriptions were sent from the fertility clinic they called me to let me know to be prepared that it could cost a lot of money depending on what our insurance covered, but to our surprise when we went to pick up the copious amounts of medication we discovered it had been entirely covered by our two insurances. I could have almost cried in the grocery store when I looked at what was almost another $5000 that ended up being covered.

I had done a few injections for my IUI procedures but this was much different. This is multiple times a day, this is mixing up the medication, figuring out doses, and having to manage a lot more information. I have a morning medication and an evening one, with a second evening one added after a few days. These shots are meant to send lots of hormones to your ovaries so instead of the normal 1 egg that you release each month you can get as many as possible.

The first morning shot went very smoothly and is probably the easiest out of all of them.

The evening one is a medication that is known to “burn” as it is injected – a very comforting thing to have in your head. It is also much more complicated to set up, with multiple vials of powder and liquid that need to be combined first.

This was a day of a lot of learning. We figured out roles with me setting everything up and doing the actual injection while Nigel read through each instruction step by step, guided me, and then cleaned up after as I iced the area to help with the burning sensation.

The days following started to become easier and easier. It took less time to set things up and the realization starts to set in that this is going to be the routine for a while.

Two days in I work my evening shift at work which means that I have to do my one shot at work. I set up in the storage room before I was running a program and called Nigel to talk through all the steps with him and again, it went easier than I ever expected.

The days continued on and I started to feel worse and worse. The bloating got really bad and I could feel my ovaries expanding and getting much bigger than normal. The last few days of injections got more and more difficult as it became more uncomfortable and more like a chore to have to do these shots every morning and evening.

The additional third shot gets added in to make sure that you don’t ovulate, but with that some of the symptoms went away and I definitely feared that I had accidentally ovulated early and this was all for nothing.

While some people have to do their stimulation for much longer, on day 9 I went in for an ultrasound to see how everything was growing and was surprised to find out that they were happy with where everything was at and it was time to trigger for the retrieval.

Those trigger shots were emotional. I had to do three separate shots and by the third one I was crying. It wasn’t because of pain, but rather the build up of everything over the past week finally coming to the end of this section of fertility treatment.

IVF is a long and difficult journey, but there are moments that speed by and the week of stimulation meds was one of those. It was a week that showed me that I could do things I didn’t think I would ever be doing while going to work, spending time with friends and family, and generally just going about life as normal.

Next: Part 21: Follicles