We are wearing quite a path to the RE clinic these days. The Nurse Practitioner was on duty this weekend and when she came in the room she said, "Dr B warned me about you!" She was referring to the hyper stimulation concern.
I have followed several TTC blogs in IVF and it seems like most people get measurements for each follicle. I don't know if my clinic just does it differently or if they just handle me differently, but they only measure 6 or 7 follicles in each ovary and calculate an average size, which is 16.5mm today. Then they try to count how many follicles are growing and today was 25 in each ovary - total 50. The NP told us she didn't see any "free fluid," which is a good thing. That is another indicator of hyper stim. Since my follicles aren't quite big enough for the trigger tonight we will see Dr B tomorrow morning.
When the nurse called with my blood results Friday she said they don't like to see estrodiol levels over 5,000. That is when you are at risk for hyperstim, but it doesn't mean you absolutely will. On Friday I was at about 3,500 so they cut the follistim to 25 Friday night and none on Saturday. Today my estrodiol is 7,054 so I will not take any follistim tonight.
I'm feeling pretty good, drinking my gatorade and eating my protein. P reminded me, though, that the risk for hyper stim continues after retrieval and increases with the transfer, because your estrogen goes up with pregnancy. So, we continue to wait and monitor. I feel my stress/worry rising the longer this uncertainty of whether I'll hyper stimulate goes on. I continue to practice my IVF meditation daily, which is helpful and makes me optimistic about getting pregnant when we do get to do a transfer.
I hope it lets me comment this time. If you have OHSS you do NOT want to do a fresh transfer--if your ovaries don't hurt yet from being so big they will start to after the retrieval, and if you get pregnant the cysts from where the eggs were won't go away (mine are still lingering, which makes me feel bloated, and it's been almost 2 months). I'm really hoping that you don't have OHSS, but if you do please don't be too hard on yourself--a frozen transfer will give you just as lovely a baby as a fresh one!
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