I am apparently ready to trigger. Wait… what?? I go in today not even sure what to expect. My ovaries still look like party central. (One nurse said to the other, “I haven’t seen ovaries like this in a long time!”) In fact, where before I had roughly 10 follicles total that were in the lead group, it appears that a good number of the small follicles have caught up. My right side has 22 mature sized follicles now, the rest being small, with a total of 30 (yesterday was 33, but that’s a normal variation between techs). My left side has the same total as yesterday (18-ish), with 10 mature and 8 below 10mm. So that’s… hmmm, 32 mature sized follicles. Oi.

I say WTF? How do you go from “a bunch of small” to “looks like mature follicles” in a matter of 24 hours of coasting? Oh who knows, my body is doing weird shit. But there you have it. They will probably get a TON of eggs from me – I wouldn’t be surprized with over 30.

But the question is how many of them will be GOOD eggs. I can pretty much write off all those smaller ones – they won’t be good enough, not after a rapid growth like that. All they did for me was increase my odds of OHSS, the little bastards. But that still leaves us with the original 10, and we know they got at least 5 days of FSH all to themselves. I like that. There might be potential in those 10. Especially when we trigger 2 hours earlier than normal.

My very first cycle I did slightly overstim (started at too high of a dose), and they didn’t know about my egg maturity problem, so to cut down on the risk of OHSS they did the standard procedure of giving me only 5,000iu of hCG trigger instead of the full 10,000iu. With normal people that works just fine – no OHSS and you still get good eggs. With me… not so much. I’ve been wondering for the past year if that half dose is what contributed to the poor quality embryos we had. So this time they’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. What they seem to be leaning towards is giving me a different type of hCG than what I have from the pharmacy – apparently ovidrel has a shorter half-life and less risk of OHSS than whatever it is I already had, allowing them to still give me the full dose. Yay!

Of course we’re still waiting on the blood test results… if my E2 has skyrocketed some more there’s a chance things will change, but as of right now I’m on course for a Wednesday morning retrieval. I do feel like some of the burden has left my shoulders… but not all of it, not by a long shot. This whole cycle has me on pins and needles, and I’m not going to be able to relax in the slightest until they actually transfer a good embryo into me. That’s my goal.

But first goal is getting to retrieval. And so far it still looks good… thank the light.