This is it. Today’s the day. I’m officially starting my new cycle. I went out yesterday and picked up my giant bag-o-meds. Seriously, I always feel a little weird hauling all that stuff home on the subway. My cycle starts with day negative 4 or 5 because I slapped on my first estrogen patch this morning and now I expect to get my period in about 4 days. Many women take birth control pills or lupron to down regulate their bodies before a cycle. And I did use BCP for my first IVF cycle and Lupron for my FET but neither of those worked too well so my RE is sticking with what worked (once, not the second time) and using the estrogen priming protocol. Fine by me… at least I know what to expect.
So today is the first estrogen patch. I’ll change it on Wednesday morning and then I’ll probably get my period before I have to change it again on Friday. Then I’ll go to the clinic for a Day 2 Start scan-and-stab appt. like everyone else. I’ll most likely start follistim that day and then add in menopur after a few days and then ganirelix after that. Hopefully my ovaries will get big and juicy, full of lovely mature eggs that will make beautiful embryos that turn into beautiful healthy live babies!
It’s kind of fitting that my cycle starts today. Today is my husbands appt for another semen analysis. He hasn’t had one since early 2011 and we thought it was about time for another. There is the off-chance that his stats will have improved more since it’s been so long since his surgery. Either way at least we will know where we stand. And since we decided to go ahead with the cycle this month even though hubs my be out of town for the retrieval, we need a frozen sample to use as a backup. Turns out they have to do an analysis for every frozen sample so technically his appt. is for cryopreservation. The analysis is a bonus. It’s a little strange to think that as of today his part of this cycle is essentially done while I’m just getting started. Oh well… wish us luck!