The One with the Meds and Appointments

This post is really for my mom, who may or may not ever read it.  This will save me from having to answer the same questions 9 million times!  Love you mom! :)

Here's a tentative calendar of the meds I will be taking to abuse prepare my body for IVF:

July 8th: Start BCPs.  The BCPs help to suppress my own hormones and kinda put my ovaries in shut down mode for the time being.
July 24th: Start 10 units of Lupron.  This is a daily injectable medicine that helps to further suppress my ovaries at the beginning of the IVF cycle.  The Lupron injection will continue for the entire cycle to make sure that my ovaries do not produce too many eggs once the stims start.
July 28th: Take last BCP.
August 3rd: Start 175 units of Follistim.  This is a daily injectable medicine that helps to stimulate my ovaries to produce eggs.  So now there will be two injections per day until egg retrieval.
August 12th (tentative): Take Ovidrel injection to induce ovulation.  The egg retrieval happens 36 hours after trigger.
August 14th: Start taking Endometrin progesterone vaginal suppository three times a day.  This helps with implantation.  If I become pregnant, I would continue taking these for 10 weeks.


Here's a tentative calendar of the appointments I will be going to:

July 18th: Consult with IVF nurse to go over meds and how to administer. (I did this yesterday and it went well.  I'm sure I'll still be a wreck when it's time to do it, but for now I'll pretend like I'm fine).
August 2nd: Baseline ultrasound and blood work.  This will provide the doctor with a starting point against which to measure the stimulation of my ovaries.
August 3rd-August 12th (tentative): Monitoring appointments with ultrasound and blood work to check on how things are going with the ovaries.  Med changes may happen based on how everything looks.  There will probably be 3-5 appointments during this time.
August 14th (tentative): Egg retrieval.  Doctor goes in and sucks out my eggs while Hubs does his dance with the sample cup.  This procedure involves anesthesia and I will provide more details on this as we get closer.  Everything gets mixed together (or in our case individual sperm get injected in eggs because we are doing ICSI - intra cytoplasmic sperm injection - to increase our chances of fertilization).  Embryologist watches over our little embryos until the transfer.  We get daily fert reports on how everything is looking.
August 17th or 19th (tentative): Egg transfer.  We will transfer one or two embryos depending on how they look that day.

Lots of info and my head is swimming already!  To keep up with all my meds and appointments I made this really fun paint chip calendar that I saw on Pinterest here.  I figured if I have to remember to assault stick my body with needles, I should at least have something pretty to look at to remind me.  Plus, I decided I should make at least one thing I've pinned!

Here's the finished product.  I don't know where I'm going to hang it yet, but I think it came out well for a quick and easy project.

I'll update along the way as protocols for my meds may change depending on how my body is responding.  Thanks for reading!