Retrieval Report

My ovaries, little over-achievers that they are, gave up a whopping 38 eggs this morning.

Between all three retrievals I've done, that's a total of exactly 100 eggs.

Please don't say "congratulations." I realize that if you're someone who struggles to get 3 or 4 eggs, 38 sounds like manna from heaven. But there's an inverse relationship between quality and quantity, and I'm at about double the maximum quantity RE was hoping for (20). And I won't bore you again with all of the details I posted last cycle about an IRL friend of mine, but suffice to say she probably hasn't made 20 eggs combined for all 4 of her IVF cycles, yet she is now 20+ weeks pg with her second baby. Even without this cycle, I on the other hand have produced 3 times as many eggs as her, and yet don't even have half the number of kiddos to show for it. And ultimately, that's the only number that means anything.

My ovaries clearly either do absolutely nothing, or else go into super-turbocharged-hyper overdrive; there just doesn't seem to be any way to coax only a few eggs into production.

Last time I had 30 eggs, and I wasn't required to go back in the next day for an ultrasound. But this time, RE is more concerned about OHSS even though we aren't doing a transfer. They gave me some sort of special fluid in the IV to try to prevent it, which I hadn't even heard of before. I also have to go in tomorrow morning for an ultrasound, and I've been instructed to continue eating salty foods for at least a week. (The salt keeps the fluid in your arteries and veins so that it is less likely to flood into the ovaries and start filling all of those now-empty follicles with fluid.)

But so far I feel fine and have minimal pain, so I'm hoping I won't develop OHSS.

Now we wait for tomorrow's fertilization report, Saturday's day 3 report, and Monday and Tuesday's biopsy reports.

On a semi-related note...we spoke with the genetic counselor yesterday. She said several patients who did CGH around the time we did had the same problem with no results, including some not from CCRM. (RMA is the lab doing CGH, so I imagine they're offering it to their IVF patients as well.)

Anyway, she said the RMA lab disposed of all of the "reading agent" (I think that's what she called it) chemicals and brought in a new batch of chemicals to see if that would fix the problem. But CCRM is now steering patients to micro-array until they get word from RMA that the issue is definitely resolved. She quoted us a 4-6 week wait, but we'll see what happens...