Photos and Post By: Emily Horstman
After our failed transfer at the end of May, we had a phone appointment with our doctor on June 16th and we decided to do another round of IVF. That meant starting over from scratch. I would be doing all of the stim meds (shots), an egg retrieval, and hopefully another transfer.
Because of Covid-19, the clinic was only allowed to have so many patients coming in for appointments. They were having to spread everyone’s cycles out. That put us on hold until August to start our next IVF cycle. In the meantime, my doctor put me on birth control and because of my egg quality, she also wanted me to start taking 3 additional vitamins. The new vitamins that she recommended I take were DHEA, MYO-INOSITOL, and CoQ10. I was already taking a prenatal and Melatonin. So all together that was 5 vitamins plus the birth control that I was taking every day. I took the birth control until July 12th, stopped for 5 days to give my body a break, and then started them again on July 17th.
My clinic requires you to have an SIS every 3 months. My last SIS was on February 27th, so guess what… I had to have another one. That appointment was on July 23rd.
This cycle was a little different from the first. We added a new medication called Lupron. I started taking the Lupron 10u by subq injection daily on August 2nd, 2020. On the 5th I was to stop taking my birth control and continue the Lupron injections. On August 12th I had my suppression check appointment and we made our cycle payment. I started taking my stim med injections on the 15th. I took the same stim meds as the last cycle, Follistim 375 IU mixed with Menopur 75 IU and we reduced the Lupron to 5u. I was to continue those injections until my next appointment on the 20th. At that appointment, they did an ultrasound to check how my follicles were growing and decided that I needed to continue the injections and come back on the 24th. The appointment on the 24th went really well. The nurse that did my ultrasound that day was named Caitlin (she is another one of my favs at ART). She was really excited at how my follicles had grown in the last 4 days. That afternoon we got the green light to trigger. The trigger shot that we used was the same as last time, Novarel. It is given 36 hours before the egg retrieval. That put my egg retrieval on August 26th, 2020.