Sunday, August 31, 2008

Crap

As in my ovaries are crap. After three days of stims, I felt it was working. I felt burning and soreness and was confident things were progressing nicely. When I went it for my first real monitoring appointment today, I couldn't hear much of what the nurses were saying, but I heard that my lining had doubled from 2 to 4, which indicated to me that my estrogen was picking up.

Well. Imagine my surprise when I called at 3 to get my instructions and was told my E2 was only 84 and that I needed to increase my dosage to 500 IUs! Jesus Christ. 500 IUs? Wow. And my estrogen was only 84? I immediately got that anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach. See, my estrogen was 36 when I was cleared to start stimming on Thursday. That means that it has increased only 48 points since Thursday. And 500 IUs?

I don't understand. I've never responded (or not responded as is more accurate) like this. I looked over my numbers from my lone IUI and IVF #1. I was at 69 after 3 days of stims on 112 IUs for my IUI cycle and at 298 after 3 days of 300 IUs on IVF#1.

I know it's too early to panic and to write this cycle off. But damn it. I'm 30 years old. The only thing we thought we had going for us and the primary reason we are pursuing surrogacy are my eggs. I've always seemed to produce decent eggs. Now my fear is that it will be a struggle to get a few eggs and they won't be good and this cycle will most definitely fail. And that we will have waited a year for the privilege of failing at something else.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. All I wanted to do this weekend was relax. Now I'm torqued up and worried about our cycle which seems doomed to failure to me, and all I want to do, all I can do is cry.

I have to return for more bloodwork tomorrow. I hope the numbers are better.

3 comments:

Sanda said...

I hear you and I can completely sympathize. I'm 30 also and had a retrieval cycle that was quite different from my one 8-9 months prior. And I was wondering "what gives?" After 3 days of stims (300 units Gonal-F/day) my Estradiol was only 22. After 2 more days of 450 units Gonal-F/day I was up to 166. But by the day before the trigger it had jumped to over 8,500! My last cycle had ended in around 2,300 - that's a huge difference! And I had more mature eggs last time then I did this time?! Both times I used 5,175 units of Gonal-F total (yikes). However, we still had a decent number of eggs that fertilized. It's so hard to tell how a cycle will end up. Even though the dosages seem high they probably will push you a bit more since they aren't transferring to you. They definitely pushed me and then put me on bcps right after and I'm still doing Lupron shots (until the bottle runs out) but after 1 week I felt a lot better and was pretty much back to normal. I hope the rest of your cycle goes smoothly and you respond well to the meds! My fingers are crossed for you!

Nadine said...

sorry to hear of the low numbers, wish i had some thing to tell you, i did 1 iui 1 ivf, but I was scanned every second day and then every day for follie size rather the e2 #'s - so I don't even know what the numbers mean, but hoping that things pick up.

Sue said...

I don't think your numbers are that low - don't start worrying yet. Things can change really fast. I hope you're more happy with the numbers from your next visit.