IVF Series: 5

May 2020

It has been 8 weeks; 56 days. I barely know what month it is anymore because taking it day by day is the only option. I sit in limbo. With this heavy uncertainty, we all sit in limbo. We sit and wait for the day we are told to resume our lives. But as the time passes, and the days go by, I start to wonder if we will be able to do that with the ease we once knew. As the uncertainty of the virus continued to spread, my anxious thoughts had almost subsided. I had mentally pushed off any idea of IVF because, well, I had to. Nobody knew the answer as to when we would be able to shop at a basic mall ever again, let alone when I would be able to do IVF; which is considered “an elective surgery.” As I continued to feel alone in this process, little did I know that many people were fighting for me. Apparently, many infertility nurses and doctors gathered together to state their cases into why fertility treatments needed to resume. It was then at this point, I received a phone call that they were starting to take the “time sensitive” patients and they would reconfigure who got to go first. This almost crushed me even more because I was so close before and I was convinced that because I am not “time sensitive” they would leave me in the shadows. A couple weeks went by with no news. Until one day. My IVF clinic posted a statement saying that they were going to resume all fertility treatments. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked, stunned, completely in disbelief. I replayed the message multiple times and reread the email. I still had a couple weeks until I needed to report to them to begin a new cycle so I figured this would give them some time to figure out a new system before I got involved. Once I was able to report to them, that is when they wrote up a calendar for me. This is ultimately an intense schedule of what medications, labs, and ultrasounds are needed to be done day by day leading up to the egg retrieval. It will require me to take multiple injections a day, and go in for ultrasounds daily to make sure the follicles (the pockets that hold the eggs) are growing at an appropriate speed. Once those hit a certain point, I go in for surgery where I go under and they extract that number of eggs from me. After surgery, they will be able to tell exactly how many eggs they retrieved and then they get fertilized immediately. Then, it is a few days until we hear back with how many of those eggs were successfully fertilized. Back in February, I was given this calendar, so to see that in writing didn’t really quite set in yet. I need to make it to that first appointment. Then, just maybe then, I will be a believer.

And for now,

Xoxo