We did it! On Wednesday January 27th Curtis and set off to Vancouver for two nights before the procedure that Friday morning to recruit the eggs I had been diligently growing for the last 2 weeks. Every weekday morning from January 22^nd to the 27th at 8:30 am I was at the fertility clinic for an ultrasound to check on how my follicles had been doing. After 4 ultrasounds between the 22^nd and the 27^th I felt like I could read them myself. It is amazing to see how quickly they grow in just 24 hours!

Wednesday night was when I got to “pull the trigger” and injected a medication that told the pituitary glad in my brain to release the hormone that will tell my follicles to let the eggs detach from their inner wall. Follicles are full of fluid so the eggs just floated around in there until they could be retrieved by the doctor on Friday morning. As I mentioned in my last post, this process is VERY time sensitive. The egg retrieval needs to happen exactly 36 hours from when I take my injection, therefore I needed to “pull the trigger” at exactly 8:30 pm Wednesday night for my procedure at 8:30 am on Friday morning. I also had to take one last injection of fertility medication to make my follicles continue growing at 5:00pm.

Now because Curtis and I were also travelling to Vancouver that same day this meant we had some logistical challenges. Firstly all my medications had to stay refrigerated but couldn’t risk being frozen, so I carefully packed my injections in a cooler bag using medical style gel ice packs and bigger solid ice packs so things stayed cold, but not too cold; it was a serious Goldie Locks situation. The next challenge was sorting out the best way to make myself a little injection station in the car. At home I would sanitize a little working area at the table to lay out all my gear, but I didn’t have a table in the car. To solve this I brought a freshly laundered hand towel with me. I draped my coat over my legs and then the hand towel, put my sharps container in one cup holder and hand sanitizer in the other and voila! (I realize I could have used the ferry bathrooms, but I really wanted to avoid going into passenger area of the ship if at all possible).

The next challenge was the timing. We caught the 5pm ferry to Vancouver which meant I had to inject myself as soon as we were on the ship, not too bad. But we were STARVING once we reached the mainland so we grabbed a bite at Milestones at the Tsawassen Mills mall. It was getting close to 8pm when we realized if we left for the hotel straight from the restaurant we could be halfway to the hotel when 8:30pm arrived as it was about 40 mins away. We had to grab a couple things from Walmart so we killed 30 mins in the toy aisle checking out what the kids are into these days (damn lego is expensive!) and headed back to the car for injection station round 2.

Tangent: Since my diagnosis there have been sooooo many times I’ve said to myself or Curtis “huh, never thought I’d be doing this” or “that’s something I never thought I would say”. But by far the strangest and most bizarre situation so far was sitting in the back of a Walmart parking lot, underneath a street light for best visibility, my t-shirt tucked up into my bra, high-waisted yoga pants pulled down so my tummy can spill out over the top and injecting myself with not 1 but 3 needles containing 2 different types of medications definitely takes the cake! I can only imagine what a passerby would have thought if they had seen the situation inside our car that night.

Thursday, we spent a wonderful day just the two of us. We went shopping, drank stupidly expensive coffee drinks and went out for a delicious dinner. It was so wonderful to just enjoy and be in the moment and not have to worry about having cancer for a little while.

Friday morning we headed to the fertility clinic in Burnaby for the procedure. I was under “conscious sedation” but luckily I remember nothing, just waking up 30 mins later in bed. Once I had come to my senses a bit they gave me some great news, 33 EGGS! In the last 2 weeks I had managed to grow 33 eggs to be big enough to be recruited! As the average is about 15-20 this was an amazing outcome! But let me tell ya, my ovaries felt it. The only way I can describe it is to relate my ovaries to a balloon. We’ve all seen an inflated balloon that over time has slowly lost its air until it was deflated, wrinkly and shrivelled… If that was a feeling, that is what my ovaries felt like. Like if my ovaries were walking down the street and came across a wrinkly, deflated balloon they would have thought “been there”. It took about 4-5 days for my overstretched ovaries to feel like they were back to their normal size and after that it was like nothing had happened.

Over the next week we received a number of phone calls from the fertility clinic in Vancouver to let us know how things were going on their end. Because embryos survive freezing better than eggs, we elected to have my eggs fertilized. Additionally, since we only have 1 shot at securing our baby insurance the clinic fertilized the eggs by injecting each egg with one of Curtis’ best swimmers, rather than putting a number of swimmers in a dish with an egg and letting them fight it out like they normally would. One week later we had 16 embryos in a freezer! Here’s a breakdown of how we got to 16 embryo’s from 33 eggs:

-33 eggs recruited during procedure

-29 eggs were the right size for fertilization

-26 eggs were successfully fertilized

-16 eggs grew into embryos and were successfully frozen

So at the end of the day, we have 16 babies in a freezer in Vancouver, how crazy is that!?! Our 16 little insurance policies will stay frozen in Vancouver until we decide to use them. We call them ‘insurance’ because it’s still possible that we may not need them; the chemo may not destroy all my eggs and I am taking a medication to help prevent that from happening (and to prevent me from going into menopause at 30, yikes). We may still be able to conceive a baby naturally, but we are so grateful to have our baby insurance just in case!

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