This is just a quick little update about how my fertility treatments are going. I had an ultrasound at the fertility clinic this morning to see how my body is responding to the medication. So far things are going well! 7 days into my fertility protocol I have 10 large follicles in each ovary, which is above average. They are varying in size from 6mm to 13mm. The goal size for egg recruitment is about 17-18mm so a few are close and others are well on the way. I will be continuing my fertility injections for the weekend and head back in on Monday morning for another ultrasound to see how things progressed over the weekend (I’ll put more information about the medical stuff below). It’s quite possible that on Monday they will let us know what day we need to be in Burnaby for the egg retrieval, yay!

Because we live on the island and at the mercy of the ferries, the fertility team requires that we head over to the mainland the day before the procedure so that we don’t have any travel delays. This is especially important as they only have a certain number of hours to get the eggs out of the follicles. And of course, this week the mainland is expecting snow on Sunday and Monday, and possibly even into Tuesday. Since we literally only get one shot at this, we really don’t want to take any chances so we are planning to head over an extra day early just in case. As we have to stay in a hotel anyways, we are going to make the most of it! We’ve decided we will get a fancy hotel downtown and have a wee bit of a get away just the two of us before I hand my body over to my doctors and chemotherapy. Even if we just stay in our room, order room service and lay around in our fluffy white hotel robes, it will be nice to get away from reality for a day. It will be like when couples go on a “baby-moon” before their babies arrive, but for us it will be a “chemo-moon”!

So here’s to our “chemo-moon” and to turning something you have to do into something you want to do! Yay!

❤ B

Medical stuff:

Just in case anyone wanted to know what all this fertility stuff is about I thought I would share what I have learned in the last couple weeks and what my fertility medications consist of.

Since my fertility team is working within a very tight time frame, they had to start what they call my “fertility cycle” right in the middle of my body’s natural cycle. From what I understand they would prefer to work within my natural hormone cycle rather than have to adjust or work against it, but there was just no way they could do that within the 3 weeks we have to work with before I start chemo.

First a quick anatomy lesson. Incase you didn’t pay attention during biology class I’ll break things down a bit. Essentially ovaries contain follicles, follicles contain eggs. Your ovaries house your follicles which each month expand in size and secrete hormones to help an egg contained inside grow until they are big enough to be released from the follicle, this is ovulation. (As I am writing this I’m remembering that I gave my blog to my fertility team today… hopefully I do them proud!) The goal of this fertility treatment is encourage my body to mature not just 1 egg during a cycle, but as MANY as possible so that when the time is right, they can remove them directly from my ovaries so they can be made into embryos and frozen for our “baby insurance”

There are 3 different types of medication they are using to help my body make as many eggs as possible. The main one is Gonal-F which stimulates my follicles to grow and release hormones to help eggs mature within them. The next medication is Cetrotide, which prevents the follicles from releasing the eggs too soon. The last medication is Letrozol which is an estrogen suppressant to prevent the lining of my uterus from getting huge during this process so I don’t lose half my blood volume during my next cycle once this is all finished. So with a balance off all of these medications they are able to manipulate my body to do what we need to secure our baby insurance. Unfortunatley Gonal-F and Cetrotide are both administered via injections, so between 5 and 7 pm every night I sit on the couch with a hand full of tummy in one hand and an injection in the other, convincing my hand to “just do it already!”

Once the follicles reach the right size they will give me another medication they call the “trigger”. They will give me the injection to take home and administer at a specific time on a certain day. What this injection will do is release the mature eggs that have thus far been attached to the inside wall of the follicles into the liquid filled area within the follicle to hang out until collection. Once I “pull the trigger” they have exactly 36 hours to collect all the mature eggs they possibly can. This is why we are going to be going over to the mainland so early, so we don’t miss our tiny window of opportunity.

That’s your biology lesson for today. I’m pretty sure all the information I have written here is correct however I have only been an “expert” for about a week so no guarantees on accuracy 🙂