A descent into madness

The waiting is the worst part. Really. The surgery is a breeze in comparison – they put you under as you’re waxing eloquent about Young Frankenstein, and then you wake up after Konicorn dreams to hear that you have 16 eggs.

Then you go home and deal with excruciating pain made all the worse because those nurses DIDN’T GIVE YOU any dilaudid, dammit, and the pain, the pain! Why it’s enough to make a perso…..okay, so that part is a bunch of happy horseshit, quite frankly. Sure, some people wind up with OHSS, aka hyperstimulation, which is very very serious and can land you in the hospital for days.

For most of us though, or at least me with my hearty peasant stock, ER is a breeze. Sure, you feel a bit bloated and the ovaries are tender and there’s a lot of peeing, but otherwise? I didn’t even hit my stash of mega-strength ibuprofen.

So the real hard part is the psychological torture of waiting for Day 2 results. My clinic doesn’t give daily updates, so I just get them on day 2 with maturity and fertilization rates, and then on day 5 for blast update. Which is fine with me, because waiting for a call every day letting me know what’s what would drive me even insaner than I already am. Plus, some people find out what grade their embies are along the way, and ORM doesn’t do that either – which, again, I’m fine with, as often it’s the shittiest looking embryos that do the best. Really.

If I knew the actual grade, that might lead to a scenario some 15 years in the future when I’m dealing with a sullen horrible teenager, with me yelling “I KNEW you’d turn out this way given that you were the crappy feral-looking embryo!!”

Anyway. Tuesday night after ER was a bit tense, to say the least. OKAY SO I MIGHT HAVE TAKEN A SLEEP AID THAT NIGHT, DON’T JUDGE.

I then got the exciting call on Wednesday morning informing me that of my 16 eggs, 11 were mature, and 8(!) fertilized! WHEE! Day 2 worries me the most always, because what if none of them fertilize? I’ve seen this happen to people, where they have a lot of eggs and exactly zero fertilize. And so then instead of hanging onto one’s hopes and dreams for another 5 days, everything goes all to hell right at the beginning. And I’m not ready for that at that stage. I want to fantasize about a whole boatload of narwhals for at least a few more days.

And so, here we are now, Sunday morning, day 5, and ORM still hasn’t called me, and I’m waiting to take Kone to the rezzy because there’s no cell phone reception there. I am losing my ever-loving mind. It’s obviously bad news, unless it’s not. As Dear Friend Yael pointed out (because of course I have to email everyone to tell them I’m losing my mind), perhaps they’re needing to biopsy my EIGHT beautiful blasts?

Or maybe they just don’t want to call me with bad news on Easter Sunday.

Shit.