Saturday, August 15, 2009

Baby in a Box

All of my girlfriends that have done IVF have posted pictures of their supply boxes upon arrival... so I felt like I needed to do the same for our own memories, but also to share in the excitement that is buzzing around our house.

To say that though - without telling you that we're preparing for the cycle to be canceled early would be wrong. We are trying to prepare for the fact that no one truly knows yet how my body will respond to all of these medications... and there is just a small window that would allow it to be successful.

We are certainly praying that this first round will work and that we'll be one of the lucky statistics - but also know that there is the possibility that my ovaries won't stimulate on this small dosage of the medicine... or it could over produce follicles as well. So we'll be praying for up to 5 follicles that all grow big and strong... or at least to the size that would allow us to take the second shot for the release!

I will call on Monday to start getting them to plan the schedule of our procedures and appointments - because I know that it'll be a challenge to plan around the upcoming Labor Day holiday. I finish my 14 days of Celebrex on Thursday - so best case would be that they tell me to stop taking the pill on Tuesday and then we go for our teaching visit on Friday. I don't know if that is realistic, but I'll know on Monday.

My hope is that they can get me off the pill soon because whatever number of continuous packs I'm on now - is one too many. I've got all the signs and symptoms that my body needs a break.

Anyway - some pictures of what we got and a little commentary:

This is everything that came in our lovely FedEx box... complete with cold pack. This represents 16 vials of the Gonal-f, 1 prefilled syringe of the ovidrel, and a sharps package.

The Gonal-f comes in these great little preset packages - they contain two needles, a prefilled syringe and the vial with a powder disk in the bottom.

We'll learn at our teaching visit how to mix all of this together in order to give me two shots a day. Funny thing though - when I first pulled one of these out to look at it - one of the needles is a reasonable size... while the other is so big and long that it looks like you could use it as a blow dart to shoot BB's at people... and I had a moment of freaking out wondering if I could truly handle this all. I talked to Karen (remember she's my boss that we won't call a boss. HA!) and she told me to visualize "being the mom" and that'll make it all better. I may have to play the soundtrack from Rocky every time a shot is needed, but we'll get through it.

I was trying to get a better shot of the Gonal-f package, but it's really hard with the plastic over it. When we start taking the shots - I'll get some closer pictures, and some pictures of John playing chemist.

This is the one syringe of Ovidrel... we've never gotten far enough into a cycle to be able to take this - so we're praying for that this time around.
It is all very exciting, scary, and thrilling at the same time - it has been a LONG road just to get to the point of being able to order these shots... so I feel like we've made a small bit of progress. I'll keep filling you in as we move along.

3 comments:

  1. I'm excited for you and wish you blessings with those needles! I couldn't do it, but then again, I had to do the blood thinner shots for weeks after my RNY, but I made Chris give them to me. As he sticks himself with insulin it was no biggy to him.

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