22nd May – It all begins

I am feeling so proud of myself. 

I gave myself a practise injection today without any difficulty. 

I looked at the needle and thought, I guess the best way to do this is to just do it and not think about it, so without hesitation I just stuck it into my tummy. 

It stung more than I expected but the needle went in easily.

I’ve got this!

We went over out consent forms, which contained some pretty big questions.

If you die, are you happy for your spouse to use the embryos? 

Are you happy to donate immature eggs and non-viable embryos to science?

Do you want to freeze or disposed of remaining embryos? 

Then we went over the medications and how to administer them. In total I will be taking 3 different medications that will have to be self-injected and 2 medications in pill form.

It all seemed relatively straight forward and hopefully when it comes to doing all of this I won’t have a complete mind blank.

The specialists have recommended that we do IVF with ICSI (Intracytoplasmic sperm injection.) This involves the embryologist selecting a single sperm and injecting it directly into an egg. With regular IVF the eggs and sperm are placed in a lab dish and left to do their thing.

I really didn’t want to go down the path of ICSI. 

So much of this process is manufactured and scientific, I like the idea of even just a little bit of the process being left up to natural selection. But I know that if we don’t do ICSI and no eggs fertilize, I will be devastated. 

Our nurse said we may not need to use ICSI, they would reassess it on the day. So hopefully on the day all will be good and we won’t need to use it.

So now we wait. 

We are very experienced at waiting.

About 2 more weeks to go. 

And I am so excited!