Egg Retreival (7/9/09)

Thank you all for the thoughts, prayers, emails, texts, and phone calls this morning!

I arrived at Dr. Haddad's office this morning at 6:45am full of emotions. I was nervous and excited. The nurse checked me in, got my iv started, and talked me through what the process would be like. Another nurse Suzanne was AWESOME! She explained every little detail of what would be happening today and when we put the eggs back in.

I went in and was put on a table. Next thing I really know was that I was waking up in the recovery room. I was told that to retreive the eggs, they take a needle and go in through the vaginal wall. They use ultrasound to guide them to the ovaries. They have to poke through the vaginal wall to go out to the ovary. They will then take each egg of individually. That is pretty much the easy part.

I woke up expecting to feel a lot of pain, but it wasn't as bad as I thought. I was having a hard time coming out of the anesthesia. I just wanted to go back to sleep. When I finally came to enough to talk to the nurse, she told me that they were able to take off 24 good eggs. That is a lot of eggs. For someone my age, it is typical to retreive 15 eggs or so. The lady in the room next to me (she was about 40) only had 4 eggs. I told Chris we should let her borrow some....lol. I had what felt like bad menstral cramps and my stomach was tender. I was able to eat some ice chips and get dressed.

I was told to expect pain for the next couple days. My ovaries will be swollen over the next two weeks due to all this stuff. I will also have some spotting and cramping. I am on complete bedrest today and shouldn't do much tomorrow. Saturday, I can resume very light activities. They will let me know either tomorrow or Saturday if we will be putting the eggs back in on Sunday or Tuesday. It all depends on how the embryos are developing.

I am home and doing well right now. Just feeling groggy and a little nauseus. I have pain medication and an antibiotic to take. I tried getting up to use the restroom earlier and felt as if I was going to pass out. I don't guess there will be much movement today. I definately feel much better just laying down.

Dr. Haddad just called as I am sitting here typing this blog. He informed me that the eggs look excellent. He did give me some disappointing news, but something we knew might happen. The lab was about to inject the embryos with the sperm and didn't find any living sperm from Chris. They suggested that we go ahead and just use the donor so that we are not wasting any eggs. This is something that we were pretty sure would happen, but we still had some hope that they would be able to use Chris. It sucks that our child(ren) won't be biologically Chris', but at least that is just DNA. Chris has and will be there for every step of this process, so he is still the father. He is more of a father already then many out there are technically just sperm donors.

I will update you all again tomorrow on how the healing process is going along. I will also let you all know when I find out what date we will be putting them back in. Keep praying for twins!!!!!!!