Egg Retrieval

Yay!  I survived egg retrieval!  I had to be at Springhill at 7am so it was an early wake up. I couldn't wear makeup, jewelry, or perfume so I was looking great. ;) We were greeted by my recovery nurse, Brenda who I actually knew from when she used to work with me as a lactation consultant on my unit so I felt much better having another familiar face there.  Justin enjoyed capturing all the moments. haha

UF Health Springhill

They got me dressed, started an IV, and hooked me up to all the wires.  

They must have asked me like 10,000 times if I had my glucose meter.  Here's a picture of me showing the anesthesiologist and my two nurses how my continuous glucose monitor works.  Melinda said that because of me, they were now purchasing a glucose meter for the clinic!  That's probably a good thing as you never know what kind of patients you will get!

I had to empty my bladder and then Justin and I said our goodbyes as I walked right into the operating room.  

Isn't this such a cool picture? The window you see on the right is the embryology lab where they had 2 specialists standing right there to immediately receive my eggs and start creating babies! This will also be the room where they transfer the embryos back in me in a few months so I will be able to watch on the ultrasound screen showing on the wall.

My nurse anesthesist was really hilarious and always having me laughing.  She told me to "show her the finger" to put my pulse oximeter on and I had to wear an oxygen nasal cannula that would give her CO2 numbers which would tell her that I was breathing.  The last thing I remember was her telling me the Propofol would feel "spicy" in my veins and I had no clue what she meant until BOY did it feel SPICY! lol. Such a weird sensation.  Almost tasted like one of those cinnamon spicy candies.  Then she was telling me jokes and I went right to sleep and I couldn't remember a thing!  It seemed so quick.  Justin was sent to give his specimen while they did my procedure.  I woke up on the recovery stretcher and Justin was right by me! I was giggly but I didn't say anything inappropriate so that was good.  

Dr. Christman met up with Justin while I was knocked out and I guess he told him that he retrieved 26 eggs!  Of course he likes his stats, so he said that I was probably in the top 2% of highest egg retrievals.  Always an over-achiever. haha 

Dr. Kramer, the embryologist met up with us next while I was still really groggy.  He said that he was going to wash down my specimen to visualize which eggs were mature and only fertilize those.  I asked about Justin's count number and he was vague saying I think it went from 1 million to 2 million.  That's good enough for me!  Justin only has about 25% that are shaped right (according to a previous analysis) so that's really only 500,000.  Dr. Kramer immediately said that Justin's motility was a lot better this time too.  If you go by our motility percentage last time, if he has around 500,000 normal shaped ones, only 10% of them move slowly leaving around 5,000 to choose from.  That must have improved to higher!  I'm wondering if it helped that we did a sample at the clinic vs. at home like before.   In IVF c/ ICSI, it's like a beauty pageant.  They want to pick the fastest moving, most normal looking sperm to inject in the egg.  Melinda then updated me that I had 17 mature eggs that they were able to inject with sperm and she didn't think they needed to use Justin's frozen sample.  I should get a number of embryos that took fertilization tomorrow!  Once again, the embryologist really recommended only putting in one baby at a time as we may only end up with a handful of embryos and you don't want to exhaust your options quickly.  We will see!  They only freeze fair and good looking embryos so it just depends on our count. 

I was only there for about 30 minutes after the procedure.  I got dressed and said my goodbyes and left our 17 little babies to grow!

And then got some Opus coffee of course ;)

I'm having some slight pain in my pelvic area.  It feels really tense where you don't want to stand up without some help.  I have a pretty big pain tolerance so they offered some Percocet but I only took one Motrin so far.  Justin is a great husband and nurse to me and Ollie has been my little therapy dog.  

I will update each check with how many embryos are surviving! Yay for kinda being like a parent for 6 days haha!