I'm home, my short-term memory is fully recovered, and once again I wasn't even inclined to crack open the bottle of norco. Five cycles down, one to go. I survived. You might even say thrived: for the first time we had fabulous follicular synchrony. The majority of my follicles hit maturation size together. There wasn't a single runaway abandoned to go after a more-numerous-but-slower-growing cohort. My stimulation cycle made its "normal" time frame debut. (Normal means 8-12 days, with 11 being considered optimal. I, on the other hand, have rocked 13-14 day cycles on my first four go-rounds, but enjoyed a privileged 11-day stim cycle with a total of just 29 injections and 5 blood draws this month.) And in case it wasn't enough to enjoy fewer injections and a shorter cycle window, I even got the largest number of eggs yet: 12 fully mature MIIs that got fertilized in a laboratory this very afternoon. Another tiny miracle of science that I have the extraordinary privilege to access. You'd think I'd be sitting pretty.
And yet.
And yet.
None of this means anything. Yet. Because I've lived through the crappiest stim cycle with a measly five mature eggs and came out the other side with a healthy euploid embryo. And I've lived through a strong, highest-estrogen-level, ten-whole-mature-egg cycle that yielded nada.
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| I've finished my part of embryo banking cycle #5. It's all in the hands of the embryologists now. |
It's time to buckle up for a few weeks of emotional roller coaster waiting for the final embryo report from this cycle while I start slathering on the testosterone: come Wednesday, the hormonal priming for cycle 6 goes into full swing. With the clock ticking on that 2024 insurance maximum out-of-pocket having been met, there's no privilege of waiting for one cycle's results before diving into the next. Once again, one more time, here we go.
