Monday, April 14, 2008

IVF#1 - BCP Complete

I finished my 2 weeks of bcp last night. The pill made me really hungry, so I did gain a few pounds. The 2 weeks flew by and if everything stays on track, the process is about to go into high gear very soon. Tomorrow I go in for suppression check. This is the visit where they do a complete history and physical, baseline bloodwork, trial embryo transfer and an intra-vaginal u/s to make sure the ovaries are quiet and suppressed. IVF is full of milestones where you're trying to not get cancelled. Tomorrow is my first milestone, I hope I'm ready to start and not told, let's try again next month. Wish me luck!

A little bit about suppression for those who are unfamiliar with this process. Every cycle, our ovaries recruit so many follicles and one will become dominant and suppress all others so that you release only one egg at each ovulation. With IVF, they want multiple eggs to be able to give you a better chance of success. Therefore, allowing a dominant follicle to start is a bad thing as it will not allow any other follicles to mature. The other thing is that you want all of your eggs to mature at the same time and rate. This is where bcp and lupron come in. The bcp quiets your ovaries, prevents a dominant follicle and hopefully gets rid of any cysts. The lupron continues this process and also prevents ovulation before egg retrieval.

People with high FSH are at risk of being over-suppressed, meaning the stimulation drugs won't be able to kick the ovaries back into high gear. Originally they were putting me on 3 weeks of bcp, and I suggested 2 for fear of being over-suppressed. I hope that was the right decision for me. We'll see!

Today is my annual pap, so I'll be getting lots of speculum action today and tomorrow, oh yippee!
Stay tuned, I'll post my suppression check results tomorrow.

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Thank you for your comment! Hugs, Kerry and Jill