I was reading the information for the research study that I mentioned on retrieval day. I just think that it’s fabulous that they are working on improving IVM. This procedure could help a lot of women like me. And I’m really happy to be able to help somehow, even if it’s just providing some immature eggs for them to look at.

Some of the paragraphs make me laugh, though. I especially love the line, “About 20% of all oocytes obtained at egg retrieval are discarded because they are immature.” Bwahahaha. 20%. That’s funny.

And that’s where the research and experimental protocols come in. I’m a numbers kind of girl, so let’s look at numbers.

IVF#1: 24 eggs, 2 mature = 8.3%
IVF#2: 13 eggs, 1 mature = 7.7%
IVF#3: 38 eggs, 3 mature = 7.9%
IVF#4: 25 eggs, 8 mature = 32.0%

Ummm, yeah. Wow. Seems I was pretty consistent on the old follistim protocol. This cycle pretty much blew them all out of the water! Guess I won’t be using follistim anymore. Menopur is my new one true love.

I doubt anyone really understands what’s really going on in there to cause this big jump. Maybe this cycle will shed some light on it for my doctor… but more likely his response will be, “Well, it worked! So we’ll keep doing it! But we have no idea why.” Obviously the FSH with a little bit of LH didn’t do much good… my ovaries need the LH, and lots of it. It’s certainly not normal.

I’m having a very hard time really believing that this has gone so well. I don’t feel as excited as I “should” – I was excited when we got the news, but now I’m bracing myself for tomorrow’s call and wondering if this is real. I said it pretty starkly before: I expected a positive pregnancy test far more than I ever expected a better maturation report like this. I mean, 6 embryos is practically.. normal!

::

My face is breaking out and my boobs hurt. Plus I’m really hungry, but every time I eat something I feel sick because I’m so bloated. Wheee, oh fun times. Gotta love IVF.