Flotsam

The series of events that led to me administering my first stim injection alone in a hotel room twenty stories above downtown Minneapolis involved lightning, a pubic hair, a housekeeper in a Hijab, and 100,000 homes left without power. That description makes it sound rather more interesting than it was—you will have to trust me when I tell you that the story does not bear repeating. Suffice it to say I am back in the land of internet access, and just in time to see that someone found my site by searching for “OLDER LADIES IN SATIN GIRDLES.” Oh information superhighway, I missed you so.

IVF Primer, Part Two: Stimulation
(Part One)
So, you’ve been taking daily injections of Lupron, and will keep on doing so until retrieval, though many protocols have you cut your Lupron dose in half when you start stims (mine doesn’t). Next you will have your suppression check, and if your ovaries are suitably cowed and compliant, you will be given the go ahead to start revving them back up again. This will be done via once or twice daily injections of the same hormones your body would produce in a natural cycle, given at much larger doses. The other difference between the hormones you produce naturally and those you inject during an IVF cycle is their provenance. Some of the hormone preparations are made from the ovaries of Chinese hamsters, others are made from good old fashioned nun pee.

Why nun pee? I’m glad you asked!
Post-menopausal women have vast quantities of FSH and LH (the hormones used to grow and mature eggs) in their urine, dumped unceremoniously into the bloodstream in sort of a hormonal going-out-of-business sale. This urine is collected and the hormones extracted and the resulting powder packaged in wee glass vials. Of course you wouldn’t want to use post-menopausal urine that had been steeping in gin and cigarette smoke (or would you?), so nuns are the obvious choice. They are both clean living and tend to dwell in packs, making it easy to gather gallons of virginal piss in one pass. I don’t know if their piety makes a difference, but I have caught myself humming “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” a few times since starting stims.

Injecting these hormones causes your follicles (the fluid filled, egg-containing sacs in your ovaries) to grow, and the eggs within them to mature. It also causes your estrogen to rise. If your estrogen gets too high, you are at risk for a particularly unpleasant complication called OHSS. People with lots and lots of follicles, for instance those with PCOS, for instance me, are at even higher risk, so let’s avoid that subject altogether, shall we?
Every other day or so, you report to the clinic to have an ultrasound to measure your follicles, and bloodwork to measure your estrogen level (E2). When you have a crop of evenly sized mature follicles, with about 100-200 units of estrogen per mature follicle, you will be instructed to take a precisely timed injection of HCG (another hormone) to prepare your eggs for ovulation, and your retrieval will be scheduled for 34 hours hence.
-FIN-

I am two days into stims and already feeling some odd pings in my ovaries. Surely this is much too early to be feeling pings? Perhaps it is my imagination, long known to be the most only fertile part of me. Still, I was thinking of reading my ovaries The Tortoise and the Hare as a bedtime story.
The injections are going well, for the most part. I am fairly certain I could give myself a Lupron injection while locked in the trunk of a moving car, but for some reason the stims have been less successful. And by “less successful” I mean “farcical.” In only two days I have:
1. Mangled finger removing stubborn cap from needle (cap came off suddenly, needle skidded along finger)
2. Forgotten to remove cap from one of the vials resulting in broken tip of mixing syringe
3. In attempting to remove air bubble, squirted out a bit of expensive medication
4. In panicked attempt to salvage precious drops sliding down needle (see #3, above), PLUNGED needle forcibly into stomach with no icing and an excess of force

You get the idea. Obviously I am a natural.