{"id":2218,"date":"2009-08-29T16:52:09","date_gmt":"2009-08-29T20:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/?p=2218"},"modified":"2009-08-29T16:52:09","modified_gmt":"2009-08-29T20:52:09","slug":"monitoring-2-exhale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/?p=2218","title":{"rendered":"Monitoring #2 &#8211; Exhale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got there really early in the morning for a Saturday, walking in the building before 8am (when they start doing scans). I had my blood drawn first &#8211; did I mention how I hate getting my blood drawn on weekends? Sigh. But I survived and she did actually get it on her first try, though I nearly yelped. Then quickly I was in an ultrasound room, chatting with the nurse and u\/s tech.<\/p>\n<p>Things look <i>great<\/i>. She counted 18 follicles this time total &#8211; 10 on right, 8 on left &#8211; which is only one off from Wednesday&#8217;s scan. And, other than a couple that were a little smaller, all of those were measuring the same size: 14-15.5mm. I was\/am positively giddy about how my follicles are looking&#8230; you can&#8217;t get much better than that. Maybe I&#8217;d have asked for a couple more in there, but even though there&#8217;s less follicles total this time I really think these might be better quality than last. There are less small ones, and I am getting acupuncture treatments. Who knows if that will do anything, but maybe. I got 6 embryos last time and I&#8217;m really really hoping I get 6 again this time&#8230; though I know for me that is a high goal, especially with less follicles.<\/p>\n<p>The nurse said she is thinking 2 more days of stims for me, which means trigger on Monday evening and retrieval on Wednesday. With my follicles the size they are today I highly doubt they&#8217;re going to be ready to trigger by tomorrow, and neither does she, but they&#8217;re having me come back in tomorrow just to check on their growth. Later in the day I got a voicemail today from the Dr himself. It cracked me up a little, because normally its the nurses who pass on boring information like &#8220;come again tomorrow.&#8221; The nurse said that I&#8217;m a &#8220;special case&#8221; and that they were sending my ultrasound and lab results to him so he could look them over and call me&#8230; but I didn&#8217;t think he would actually call me <i>himself<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>He said my E2 is 1500 today. Sheesh, that sounds so low! I know it&#8217;s not, but my previous cycles have almost all had much higher E2 (which is why they&#8217;re always so concerned about me!).<\/p>\n<p>Then I did have my acupuncture appointment. My acupuncturist moved to a different office, which felt a little weird (because it&#8217;s a new place, unfamiliar). She was very pleased with my progress in the cycle. One belly point really made me jump when she put it in&#8230; like an electric shock. I don&#8217;t think I quite fell asleep this time, but I almost got there. Then she left me and the massage therapist came in. Right away there was definitely a clear difference between this and the spa massage. I could feel him finding all the muscle knots and trying to work them out. He spent a long time on my back, which I liked. But yeow, did some of them hurt. It wasn&#8217;t just that he was doing deep tissue, but there were many spots where he just touched them with his fingertips with <i>light<\/i> pressure and my muscles spiked. Pretty sure I had some huge knots. I do think they felt looser by the end, but it was not what I would call a relaxing massage where you fall asleep or anything! A few times I really had to work at breathing steady. I do think it&#8217;s what my back needed, it&#8217;s been a mess lately, and I hope it all relaxes and stops aching soon. Or I&#8217;m going to need another massage. LOL (A gentler one!)<\/p>\n<p>And now it is nap time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got there really early in the morning for a Saturday, walking in the building before 8am (when they start doing scans). I had my blood drawn first &#8211; did I mention how I hate getting my blood drawn on weekends? Sigh. But I survived and she did actually get it on her first try, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,208,284,136,63],"class_list":["post-2218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-acupuncture","tag-ivf-5","tag-massage","tag-stims","tag-ultrasound"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2219,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218\/revisions\/2219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}