IVF Journey: Egg Retrieval

As I sit down to write this post, I can feel the tears coming to my eyes. This is something that we didn’t even share with all of our family or a lot of our friends when we begin the process. We wanted to keep it a secret because if it didn’t work, we could prevent some disappointed for a lot of people who are believing with us for Baby Polk. Looking back, keeping it a secret made it so that my husband and I kind of suffered on our own. Thankfully, we had the few friends and family that knew who were there for us. Honestly, we weren’t sure how to handle it. We had a plan to surprise everyone with this beautiful announcement on Valentine’s Day. “One more heart to love”. Don’t steal it LOL! We definitely didn’t want to get everybody excited and it didn’t work. So, we kept it a secret. If you have followed me for any period of time you know that we aren’t parents yet. But we are going to try again.

The Egg Retrieval Process

The first part of IVF is retrieving your eggs, which is essentially removing the mature eggs from your ovaries rather than your body naturally releasing one to potentially meet with sperm. Before I could even start with the egg retrieval process, the doctor told me that I needed to lose some weight to have a more successful chance of getting pregnant. I spent the months of April through August 2018, losing 30 pounds, and I was very proud of myself.

In September, I started one month of birth control. That seemed crazy to take birth control to get pregnant. But taking them helps to get an idea of what your fertility cycle will look like the next month. In October, I went on two injectable medicines to grow as many eggs as possible: Ganirelix and Leuprolide along with an antibiotic, baby aspirin, and prenatal vitamins. Normally each month you grow multiple eggs, but your body releases one mature egg. But on this medicine, you are forcing your body to grow and mature as many eggs as possible without releasing any of them. After about a week of this medicine, I had to visit the doctor’s office every other day to monitor the growth and maturity of my eggs. I was driving almost an hour each way! The whole process of maturing the eggs took about 2 1/2 weeks.

The doctor expected to get about 16 eggs from me, but I grew 22. Can you imagine carrying around 22 eggs in your ovaries? It wasn’t necessarily painful, but you could tell that something needed to happen, some sort of release was needed. I felt bloated, tired, emotional. Also, I had to be super careful with my movements to avoid ovarian torsion which would essentially cut the blood supply to your ovaries and ruin your chances of natural childbirth forever. But I thank God that I didn’t have any kind of complications other than being irritated. Once the eggs are mature, you get a shot in the butt to release them and come back in a day or so for the retrieval.

On the day of the egg retrieval, we were so excited! I was glad to get those things out of me, and we were just glad to be continuing on with the process with everything looking good. We went in around 6am, and the doctor removed the eggs under anesthesia. And this point they tell you to just go home take some Tylenol (not ibuprofen) for pain, and you should be good to go back to work the next day. That was definitely not the case for me. I needed about three days of recovery. I found out later that because I had so many eggs removed, my uterus was very swollen and took longer to get back to normal size. I also found out that I could take ibuprofen because I was not going immediately back to transfer an egg to my uterus. (We chose a frozen embryo transfer.) I took the ibuprofen and started to feel better, but my next period was hell on earth!

After the procedure, the embryologist tells you to expect to lose about half of your eggs at each step of the process.

Step 1: Attempt to fertilize each of the eggs with my husband’s sperm, 17 eggs were fertilized

Step 2: Let the embryos mature for about a week and see which ones survive to go on for genetic testing, 10 eggs survived

Step 3: Decide how many embryos you can afford to have tested for sex and genetic abnormalities, we sent 6. 2 embryos were found with genetic abnormalities. The remaining two boys and two girls were normal

Step 4: Freeze 8 embryos. We’ve used one and the remaining are waiting for us to come and get them.

Now for the question everyone wants to ask: How much did all this cost? We spent almost $16,000 on the first round of IVF which included each doctor visit, the medicines, the egg retrieval, all the testing of the eggs and blood tests for Robert and I, his two sperm samples, and the first transfer we did.

This was October 2018. After our first transfer failed in January 2019, I was so sad, feeling depressed to the point that I sought counseling. I still don’t know if I’ve fully dealt with it, but thanks to everyone who is showing support and will show support in the future. All of you help us have hope that we will be successful eventually. We saved up a lot of money to do this, and we missed out on a lot of events, weddings, and trips. But we knew it would be worth it one day. And although it didn’t work the first time, I know that it will still be worth it one day.