The second harvest at the end of January 2017, was most successful. Again, we administrated shots every evening to grow the eggs.
Again, we had to get up every other morning at 5:30am to go to the doctor and monitor my hormone levels and the follicle growth. The early morning blood draws have the most accurate levels. Lynn helped a lot this time with the driving. Thank goodness for her.
Again, my ovaries grew from the size of an almond to an apple.
This time i asked more questions to learn about the science of everything along with the time frame. Around day 3 (first day is the first day of the period), i take estrogen twice a every day for about 5 days to signal to my body that it is time to mature some eggs so we can ovulate. The extra estrogen will increase the egg count. A normal healthy woman will actually start to mature about 10-14 eggs naturally but only one (or two) are released.
Around day 7, we start the shots. These shots contain menopur, and something else that stops the signal to my brain that send another signal to my ovaries to release the eggs. This allows the other eggs to mature too. The menopur is a synthetic hormone that is found in post-menopausal women’s urine that tricks your body into thinking this is the last chance to get pregnant so the hormone tell the ovaries “ready all the cannons” basically.
When a follicle is between 14-16mm the natural signal happens and all the eggs are released, but only one (or two) are mature enough to actually be fertilized. The “something else” stops the release part from happening so the rest can mature too.
Then when most eggs are at least 14mm, they have me do another shot that is the hormone that is sent to release the eggs. However, this hormone also tells the eggs to do meiosis, when the egg “drops” 1/2 of the chromosomes so that it can accept the other half by the sperm to make the full set of 46 chromosomes and that equals a baby. This shot is a very, very, very, time sensitive shot. Meiosis takes about 40 hours so they need to do the “harvest” before this time and the eggs are released and all was for nothing. But they cannot do it too soon and meiosis is not complete resulting in “bad” eggs.
At 36 hours, they do the harvest vaginally while i am asleep with the “twilight” sleep – not the full on out general anesthesia sleep. It is very painful and i hurt for about 3 days after. Much like extreme period cramps or Braxton Hicks contractions. The transfer happened on January 30th.
This time though we got 31 eggs total, 26 were healthy mature eggs, 17 fertilized, 11 made it to day 3, and 7 made it to the blast stage that happens on day 5 or 6.
7! 7 made it to blast! We have 7 children that were frozen and any one of them would be ours. Now we have to wait until the genetic test results come back to let us know which would be boys and which would be girls and if any of them have any disorders.
Waiting is not a strong area of my life… *sigh*