Egg Retrieval Complete!

Yesterday, Lance and I headed out to Vancouver for the egg retrieval.  To say that I was a bit nervous would be a serious understatement.  I could have avoided this by not reading all those damn forums, but it's just so hard to avoid them!

We left at 6am, and wouldn't you know it... It was snowing.  It's a good thing we took the snow tires off yesterday.  *sigh*

I nervously waited for the nurse to come and get us, which took FOREVER!  Talk about building suspense!  Finally, we were brought in to the procedure area where a nurse went over what was going to happen, and answered any questions that we had.  She gave me a couple of Tylenol, 1mg Ativan and started an IV, then hung 1g Ancef (an antibiotic).

Looking a bit pale.  Soooooo nervous!  

Lance, playing around with his surgical cap!
He doesn't like to smile for the camera.

When they finally had the procedure room ready, we went in.  Lance got to sit on the chair beside me whilst I hoisted my bare legs into the stirrups.  Dr. Kashyap came in and told me to try and relax and that this wasn't a procedure room, it was a meditation room.  She did a fantastic job of helping me calm down... That and the Fentanyl they were giving me through the IV.

I'd love to say that it was a painless experience, but it definitely wasn't as painful as I'd built myself up to imagine.  It was crampy and pinchy.  The thought of them poking a needle through my vagina into my ovaries made it all worse.

The whole thing probably lasted 20 minutes.  They said that they were able to retrieve 16 eggs (which is great), then helped me into a wheelchair and back to the recovery area.  The nurse came and checked my vitals every 15 minutes and brought me juice and cookies.  I slept on and off, feeling nauseated when I tried to move.  After an hour, I was good to go, other than the cramping pain, but that is to be expected for the next couple of days because my ovaries are the size of football fields.  I slept the entire way home, then I slept on and off for the rest of the day.  I finally crawled into bed around 9pm, and slept solid until 5:30am (Which is when we got up to watch the Canadian Men's Team win the final gold medal in the Sochi 2014 Olympics!  Go Canada, Go!!!

I felt a little uneasy this morning as I knew we would be getting a call from Genesis this afternoon to let us know how the fertilization process was going.  They called at 9am.

You cannot even imagine how many things went through my head when I heard the phone ring and waddled over to the coffee table to answer it...

"Why are they calling so early?  This can't be good!"
"Are they going to tell me that they mixed up the specimens?"
"Did they have a huge power-outage because of the snow storm and the embryos are ruined?"

One of the lab techs (after confirming that he was talking to me) said "Good news!"  I breathed!  Apparently they were able to collect an amazing 20 eggs from me yesterday.  19 were injected and 12 have made it to fertilization day one!!!  This means that we have 12 chances to make a baby happen!  Apparently they will only transfer one embryo, so it doesn't look like we'll have the chance at multiple births, but whatever!  I just want a healthy developed baby, and if that means only one... Then that's good enough for us!

We won't hear anything from Genesis tomorrow as they are just going to let the embryos do their thing until Tuesday morning, then we get another update and they should set the date for our embryo transfer.

All in all, I'm feeling pretty confident right now.  Let's just hope that my uterus is on the same team!