Seventeen

My body is doing weird things and I don't know how to internalize it. My second IVF cycle kicked off the same as last: antral follicle count of 9. Those follicles looked nicely synchronized and they were a bit chonkier than the teensy dots we saw on my first cycle's baseline day. Yay!

Technically, everything that's happened since hasn't been bad. From my first monitoring appointment, I had 11 responding follicles - a happy surprise and big improvement over the 2-ish that seemed to be responding at the start of my first cycle.

For a while, everything felt like it was "on track." I knew how IVF looked and how I could expect to feel. I knew what my version of "optimal" looked like: maybe all 11 follicles would keep growing, maybe they'd all grow in sync, maybe I'd slide into the standard 8-12 day stimulation cycle that my clinic says is standard. (Last cycle, I'd fallen just outside the "normal" window with a 13-day cycle.) Things started going sideways over the weekend, when I somehow had maintained the 11 follicle count despite losing two on one side. (How do you even lose any??) From there things just got weirder.

On the one hand, I'm now rocking a minimum 14-day stimulation cycle and it may just keep going. I'm anxiously checking my phone for the latest news, and highly cranky that my surgery may fall on a weekend, robbing me of my hard-earned day-off to just chill after enduring a full cycle of poking, prodding, stabbing, and draining just to get way fewer gametes than a man can emit with a few minutes of fun.

On the other hand. I've climbed all the way to 17 follicles, thanks to my heavy-hitting left ovary bearing 13. On its own, it could be fabulous news—it certainly isn't bad—but those follicles aren't synching. Now my team is trying to figure out how to optimize the number of eggs we retrieve, and I have to accept that half of them may be throw-aways.

I hadn't realized how much I'd internalized that 9-to-11 antral follicle count as a part of my identity. I'd alternately mourned and celebrated—I'm past my peak but it's not too late!—and baked that into how I see myself. Now I don't know whether to celebrate that my body is surprising me with a bigger egg reserve or mourn the fact that I can't properly tap into that reserve. All the while I need to maintain focus in a competitive and completely male-dominated workplace where pretty much none of my coworkers could understand this experience. So, you know, a regular Wednesday. Hooray.