Boo!

So, I am scheduled for a Monday retrieval, which will mean a day-five transfer on Halloween. If all goes well. Since I am smack in the middle of that looking-for-harbingers-of-fortune phase, I will take this as a good sign - Halloween is basically all about kids and a sense of the macabre, and that pretty much goes for IVF, too. What with the affidavits regarding our deaths, and all.

I am going to stim for one more day. I have six follicles in the acceptable range (18-20mm) and four that are almost there. An extra day of growing may mean that I have 30% or more additional eggs to work with, so it seems worth the extra $300 of injectables. I'm not sure where I'm going to put those last three needles, but a few more bruises at this point won't really make much difference.

By the way - here's my advice re: ganerelix. The 250 mcg prefilled syringe can be split into two 125 mcg micro-doses. That means you have to shoot the pre-fill into an empty vial and then withdraw half of it back into a tiny lupron syringe. The second dose goes in the fridge for the next day. Easy-peasy, except for sucking the last few drops of liquid money out of that little vial, which requires a lot of squinting and keeping the end of the needle right at the rubber barrier top.

To make it easier, my pharmacy will compound the ganerelix into separate doses, each in their own little vials. It was much easier to get the right amount out, since they always seemed to overfill it a little bit. Except - they diluted it! So the 125 mcg - which is equivalent to 25 IU on the lupron syringe - was now mixed with 25 IU of sterile water! So I was only injecting half of the dose! To stop pre-retrieval ovulation! After injecting myself with over $2,000 worth of drugs!

Okay - enough with the exclamation points. I am just incredibly relieved that it seems to have made no real difference. My point is, I guess, double check and re-read and question everything. If I had read the teeny-tiny label on the itty-bitty vial that said "125 mcg in .5 ml sterile fluid", and done the math to convert .5 ml to IUs, I might have wondered if there wasn't some kind of discrepancy. Maybe.

And, finally, to Maureen - if you're reading this - please please please say you'll come to my house at 10:00 Saturday night to give me my hcg shot. My husband is too pathetic to even look at a needle that long, and you are my only real-life friend who even knows anything about all this. Plus, it doesn't hurt that you're a licensed EMT. Girls night out? Dinner and a movie? What else is there I can bribe you with?