Sperm Day 5: Sperm Fast, Sperm Furious

Today is my final Sperm Day, whether I get pregnant or not this cycle. If I get pregnant, there will be “Scan Day”s, “Finding Midwife Day”s, and “Ouch That Baby’s Head Was Big Day”s. If I don’t get pregnant this cycle, Sperm Day will become Embryo Day, starting a spin-off series.

Today I got to go in the FANCY procedure room (room 1, I think the nurse said), which has a chair with a removable end (meaning you don’t have to scoot your bum up and down the bed) and actually looks like the ones you see on TV, rather than something from a public hospital in the 80s. Pretty sure all the procedures seen in Inconceivable were in this room, for instance.

There were 2 million sperms in the vial. Insertion of the catheter through my cervix was at least as bad as the worst one before today, and it may have been even more painful. Like being stabbed a lot in the cervix, followed by fairly bad cramping. I am home now with my feet up, so hopefully that will go away before I need to start making dinner. No need for another LH test tomorrow – the lab people and the nurse were confident that we hit the ovulation head-on.

So: now for another two-week wait. I am feeling much less confident this time around than any of the other times. I feel as though it may well take IVF, if even that works, to get me knocked up. So I guess this cycle is just a stop-gap, until I can get down to the serious business of IVF.

I had a look at the IVF standard procedure on the FA website, and it looks like the first embryo transfer likely won’t be until January at the earliest – I won’t be able to start as soon as I get a negative blood test, as I need to see the doctor first, which will probably not be until mid-next-cycle, so that makes one month disappear. Then you have to go on the pill for a month (second month of waiting), then you have a couple of weeks of ovulation-stimulating meds before egg harvest.

In the middle of all that, we have December, and the Xmas holidays, when FA is down to bare bones. And also when I will be out of town for the theoretical first opportunity of egg harvesting (as it falls on or pretty close to Christmas Day). So that adds at least a month, as I do want to have Xmas with my family.

Additionally, they may want to wait a month before embryo transfer, even if they collect the eggs in January – if I am looking at risk for ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, for example.