Tags
Donor eggs, fertility, FET, Infertility, IVF, lining, running, scan
I had my lining check today. It was 6.3 and triple lined and I’ve still potentially got another week of low dosage stimming to do before I trigger and then a few days after that before I transfer (hopefully) my defrosted embryo(s). So that was pretty good news. Fingers crossed this protocol works for my lining. Grow lining!
Afterwards I nipped along to watch some of the London Marathon. I go up to the course every year to support my club and fairly often my husband and brother in law, and I’ve run it myself 3 times. My husband was running this year but dropped out at mile 19 (this was planned as he has been ill and hadn’t trained for the full distance, he has a championship place which are for fast club runners so just did it as a training run).
In some ways the fertility journey, and in particular the IVF journey, remind me a bit of running a marathon. You prepare for a marathon by taking on proper nutrition and hydrating (as well as doing the actual running prep). When you start out on the marathon course you feel apprehensive and nervous but excited at the same time, for a while (if you’ve trained) you feel pretty good, running along enjoying the support, taking on your nutrition and feeling fairly positive about your prospects. And then somewhere (usually at about 20 miles for me) you start to feel crap, physically and mentally, and there begins a long, hard slog to the finish where you find yourself counting every step and agonising about every twinge (the last 6 miles is a million times harder than the first 20). Sound familiar? I still love running though, I’d rather run a few more marathons than do IVF!!!
I popped along to our usual marathon pub after the race to celebrate with the finishers from my running club and commiserate with those who hadn’t made it to the start line through injury etc. There are now a lot of babies / small children amongst our friends and sometimes it’s hard, especially when there are more pregnancy announcements in the pub but you have to roll with it. It was nice to see two of our friends who have a little girl through a donor egg (I think we’re the only ones who know this, though others know they’ve had IVF) and see how they are a normal family (I know – why wouldn’t they be? But sometimes I do get the fear about using donor eggs so it really helps me to see this normality).
I’ve started to feel a few more side effects from the stimulation but nothing too bad. I managed to fit a run in this morning and don’t yet feel uncomfortable though I’m definitely peeing a lot more now. Next scan is Tues and I need to remember to check how large my ovaries are as I’m still running at the moment. I usually give up about a week into stimming partly because of potential impacts on egg quality and partly because of risk of ovarian torsion, I don’t have to worry about egg quality this time but do need to check I’m not going to damage my ovaries. Here’s hoping the lining continues to thicken and we see more progress on Tues.