Beginning a Crazy Ride

Flashback October 2010

In the beginning of October, we began the journey down the IVF Turnpike. For those of you that have never been down that road - I call it a Turnpike because once you pay the initial toll, you have to proceed, and there is no quitting.


First came the medications. I had to take shots - up to three a day - in order to get my ovaries to be hyper-productive. The hormone treatments that were packaged for us were Menopur, Gonal-F and Lupron. Rob, my wonderful husband, braved my winces and gave me the shots each day.

For the first week, the Lupron was administered each morning in the belly. It wasn't so bad - the needle was small... so I hardly felt it. The next week, it was time to begin the Menopur and Gonal-F. Menopur, which is apparently highly volatile in liquid form,  came as a pill and saline... and Rob had fun playing chemist while mixing it. I did not share his excitement as I was the one who had to have the shot (remember, I hate shots). Needless to say, the saline made pain with this one unavoidable - it stung horribly no matter what poor Rob tried... and when they increased the dosage, I wanted to cry. The Gonal-F wasn't a party, either. It came in a pen form... Rob would dial up the proper dosage and you'd hear it click-click-click until the dosage was administered. (At least that and the smell of it were the worst parts - it was relatively painless otherwise.)

After a few bumps and some increases in the medications... we finally reached the day for the HCG trigger shot. Rob took one look, and promptly called our neighbor, Vickie and asked her if she could come over and administer the shot. I didn't know he'd done this until she knocked on the door.

The HCG trigger had to be administered exactly 36 hours prior to the scheduled time of the retrieval... with a margin of error of only 5 minutes on either side. The needle was longer and the dose larger than any of the previous ones we'd used. Vickie, being a former trauma nurse, knew exactly what to do to distract me prior to the shot. I never even felt the needle - nor did I feel the after-effects of the shot (it was supposed to feel like a flu shot on my buttock... I never felt a thing.) As a matter of fact, my flu shot that I took in October hurt worse than this trigger shot that was supposed to feel a lot like, but worse than, a flu shot. (However, I suspect this was because the nurse who gave me the flu shot was peeved that I'd been sent to OB when I was not yet an OB patient.)

You might be wondering how they know when they should administer the HCG trigger shot... well... let me share with you. For the entire time we were doing the shots (Gonal-F/Lupron/Menopur), we were going into the clinic every couple of days to get blood drawn and see what the hormones were doing. We also went into the Rep. Endo clinic several times to do trans-vaginal ultrasounds to do a count on  how effective the medications were on my ovaries and their production levels. What an interesting process - once the productivity was at their desired level, they scheduled us to come in for the retrieval and we were to administer the HCG trigger within the prescribed window of time.