Happy St Patrick’s Day! The luck of the Irish was with us today 🙂 Today was Screening Day. I had to get up bright and early at 5 am to catch the 7 o’clock ferry to Vancouver… Except that my 5 year old came crawling into my bed at 4 am, wanting to snuggle “because I just love you soooo much, and I’m not going to see you tomorrow!” 💜 I never got back to sleep after that, so I’ve been up since 4am. My lovely sister came over at 5:45 to take care of the kidlets for me and off I went. I wasn’t sure if I was going to see my IPs today or not. But while I was on the ferry, I got a text from my awesome IM that they would see me soon. It was a day full of appointments for all of us. I went in to see the counsellor for my psych screening at 10am. That went great, and I ran into my IPs on my way out. It was their turn for screening. After that we met at PCRM (the fertility clinic). IM and I had a nice little chat but we didn’t have much time. I’m happy to say that in the event of a successful pregnancy, IM is going to try to induce lactation so she can nurse the baby herself! Woohoo, I was so happy to hear that! They would also love for me to pump and give them the colostrum, and possibly some of the milk too, if IM doesn’t have a good supply built up yet when baby is born. That’s perfect, because I was planning on pumping regardless. If my IPs don’t need the milk, I will donate it.
So anyway, then we had the next appointment. IM, IF and I met with Tracy, the nurse manager at PCRM. She talked us through the med protocol, gave us supplies (needles, syringes and sharps kits) and taught us how to do our injections. Then off we went to see the RE, Dr Havelock. We went through medical histories, signed off a bunch of consents, and then I had to have an ultrasound to check to see if my uterus is good and healthy – they look for polyps or fibroids that might make it harder for IVF to work. I got the green light on everything. My uterus looks perfect, blood work came back great, and the counsellor told my IPs that she had no concerns for any of us. So she is sending her official approval off to the RE, and the only thing we have left to do is finalize the contracts. A rough draft has already been done up, and should be in my possession tomorrow. If we can get it finalized before my next cycle starts, we will be starting meds with my next cycle. If all goes according to plan, it should be a late April or early May transfer. My med protocol is pretty simple – much less than some of the others I have seen. I will need to be on Estrace for about 2 weeks, then start Lupron, and then progesterone supps. The Lupron is the only injection, and it’s into the tummy with quite a small needle. Which is nice, because a lot of surros get PIO (progesterone injections) that go in the butt and cause a lot of knots and bruising. So I’ll be avoiding that, but the supps come with a different kind of fun all their own lol. Oh, and I also got a prescription for prenatal vitamins (more folic acid than over the counter) and will be starting those tomorrow.
IM and I also talked about how many embryos to transfer. It’s awesome, because we are both on the same page with absolutely everything! We would both prefer to transfer only one embryo, because when you get into multiples, the chances of complications go way up. That said, the RE has informed us that due to IM’s age, the chances of a successful cycle are less than with a younger woman, because her eggs are getting old. He said with one embryo we have a 30-35% chance of success. With two he puts our odds at 50%. But transferring 1 means a 1% chance of twins (if the embryo splits) and transferring 2 means a 20% chance of twins, plus a chance of 3-4 if any embryos split. We will be doing a fresh transfer, not frozen, so right now we don’t know anything about embryo quality, or how many we’ll have to work with. The RE agrees that if the embryos are of good quality, and there are enough leftovers to freeze, we will do a SET (one embryo), because if it doesn’t work we can just try again the next month. But if they’re poor quality and unlikely to survive freezing, we’ll transfer two. So here’s hoping for lots of good quality embies!
I will update again when the contract is finalized 🙂
The Baker
justthebaker 