Eggs and Special Men

I have wanted to post an IVF update but decided to wait until I had a bunch to fill y’all in on.. Well its finally time and I have LOTS of pictures hooray! Remember that pic I posted on social media a little while ago when all of my IVF meds arrived?? In case you missed it, here it is again..

One of those is just a bag of needles… A BAG OF NEEDLES PEOPLE! As someone who hates needles, I have seen that bag show up in my nightmares numerous times. Anyways.. The first thing our doc needed for this IVF journey to baby Litherland was a sample of Cliff’s special men and a bunch of eggs from me. For Cliff, this required one visit to the doctors office where he gave them the special men while I, like a 10 yr old, giggled in the waiting room. 😛 For my part, it was an entirely too complicated process because we needed to grow as many eggs as possible. Since women usually only grow one egg a month, how did we accomplish this?? I’m glad you asked! First, they had me doing 3 shots per day. So for the first 5 days, this is what I got to look forward to every night..

The first night I looked at that, suddenly my usual 1 shot per day didn’t seem so bad haha The 2 new daily additions were not like my usual daily shot (far left) where I could just open the package and it was ready to go. One was a pen (center) that I had to attach a needle to each night and dial up to the correct dose. Not a big deal. The other one was not so simple. It was like being in one of my chemistry classes all over again where you get specific instructions on how to make the solution you needed to inject yourself with. (Ill elaborate on that in a minute) On day 6, they added another shot because I obviously wasn’t stabbing myself enough every night 🙄 So for days 6-9 my nightly anxiety looked like this..

The new 4th shot had almost the same set up as the 3rd one, minus one step. Okay now we can go back to the chemistry class instructions comment. I set up all the things I needed for each shot before getting them all ready. This made it easier for me to just inject them one after the other and not lose my nerve to do all of them. This is what the set up looks like each night when you are your own science experiment..

After 9 days of these shots and ultrasounds every other day (literally) at the doctors office, they counted 27 follicles that had grown which hopefully had eggs mature eggs in them. To say I was bloated was an understatement. You know that feeling when you eat entirely too much, swear to never eat again, and seriously fear your stomach might explode?? That’s how the lower half of my body felt all the time!

Finally my retrieval day arrived and they were able to get 17 eggs! I was thrilled because you lose some with each step of the process and we needed to start with as many as possible. After they evaluated and fertilized the eggs, we got a call the next morning that we had 8 embryos. 8 of them! Probably the best phone call I’ve had during this whole thing. We then had to wait 5-6 days to see how many of those 8 would survive until freezing day. On day 5, we got the call that we had 2 embryos that were being frozen. The first words out of my mouth were.. well.. that’s better than none!

To be honest, I was kind of upset at first because I was focusing on the fact that only 2 out of the 8 survived and we were hoping to have at least 6. But Cliff, that amazing man, was beyond excited and quickly made me realize that those 2 might be all we need! Once that finally sunk in, all I could think about was that we have 2 potential baby Litherlands waiting for us right now! I mean.. they actually exist!! There’s no hoping and praying that we create a little embryo to grow anymore. WE, Cliff and Danae, have 2 amazing embryos and they are REAL and they are OURS and I couldn’t be happier!!! 😀 😀

I’m currently still recovering from the egg retrieval but I will update everyone on what’s next for us in a few days! In the meantime, did I confuse anyone when I mentioned Cliffs “special men”?? If you didn’t get that reference, it is from an episode of That 70’s Show that Cliff and I joke about. I added a short clip of it below because its just hilarious especially now with everything we are doing. Enjoy! ♥