DONE!

So.. I may have forgotten to take my last BCP (birth control pill- ironic, right) last night.

Birth control is used in many IVF cycles to "calm" the ovaries prior to the beginning of your cycle, as well as to time your IVF if your clinic batches women, or if you have commitments and need to start your cycle at a certain time.  In a natural cycle, the ovaries mature 1 or 2 leading follicles out of all of the resting follicles. That's not what you want in IVF, so the birth control can suppress those leading follicles, resulting in 8, 10, or even in some cases 20-30 follicles maturing at the same rate so that you have a better selection of eggs to fertilize. 

Our clinic is hoping that I make around 15 mature eggs this cycle. In a healthy couple (without male infertility) approximately 75% of eggs will fertilize. Since DH has poor sperm quality, we will be using ICSI, where they inject 1 sperm into each egg. Most clinics agree that fertilization rates are lower for ICSI, so we are hoping for somewhere near a 60% fertilization rate.  If all goes perfectly according to plan, we will hopefully have somewhere between 3 and 5 viable embryos by the time we get to our transfer.

But things might not go according to plan. And I've just come to accept that it's out of my hands. 

So we start our stims on Saturday. I'll be sure to get a good picture of my med haul... because it's quite impressive! We are supposed to do our injects between 6 and 8 PM every night. We have a football game on Saturday... so my first round is probably going to be a bit early.