Day 19 (Round 2 of IVF Stims): Trigger Shot Time

(Entry written prior to posted date)

My doctor recommended I should wait another day due to some of my eggs being just under the size they want. I think they said 3 or 4 were just under the size and they think and one more day could make the difference between mature eggs and not mature eggs. I’m not gaining any more weight which I am really happy about. I’m also not feeling as bloated either, it’s about damn time. I’ve been peeing a lot, like a lot a lot. My first IVF round I started peeing a lot after the surgery and not before. So I am kind of worried about this being a sign that my body might be losing my eggs before the surgery, but I’m not bleeding at all, so I don’t know.

I don’t have headaches anymore, I’d say they stopped a few days ago. I’m not sure which injection was causing the headaches. I hear Lupron tends to do that. It seems like when I was getting the most headaches it was first thing in the morning and then it would dissipate in the afternoon.

I got the call back this afternoon from my clinic and they said I am good to go ahead and trigger tonight! It’s been a really long cycle for me so I am so ready to get this done and head back home. I’ve been really missing my husband and my puppy. My husband doesn’t get as much time off from work as I do and he had already used up his time for the year. But I am really happy my Mom has been here for support. I am so ready to do this trigger shot and get this egg retrieval done and over with.

Later that day…

I just did my trigger shot. I was really confused this time about how to do it. Last time it was a simple 10,000 IU shot of Pregnyl. But this time not only was I on a different HCG shot (Novarel) but it came in two seperate 5,000 vials instead of just one 10,000 vial. There were several things confusing about this. First, the pack came with two shots. So I thought maybe I needed to inject myself twice since there were two vials and two shots. I looked on the packet they gave me and it was worded really weird. Plus the video instructions did not cover how to do it if you have two separate vials of powder medicine. I even tried looking on YouTube to see if there were instructions with two separate vials, but I could not find anything and time was running out.

Luckily, I remembered from my first retrieval they had mentioned the one packet of instructions they initially gave me needed to be updated. I also remembered they sent me an email about my updated instructions (different from the first set) for the trigger shot. I rechecked my email and there was an attachment that I hadn’t read yet. That attachment had instructions specific to my medicine as well as my dose. So had I not double checked all my paperwork I would have needlessly called their answering service. The moral of the story is even when you think you know what you are doing with your trigger shot try planning ahead and do a practice run of what you are actually doing. I am a visual person so it would have been better to have pulled everything out of the box to see what I was working with. It turns out I needed to mix both of the powder vials with the liquid, instead of doing two separate injections. I gave myself plenty of time to mix the medicine this time, compared to last time. That proved to be a good idea, because the mixing of the two vials took a while. The powder took a long time to dissolve. So for me at least, it worked out perfectly to start getting everything ready 20 minutes before the exact time I had to inject. After the powder had finally dissolved it turned out I only had two minutes to spare. Plus I think the Novarel powder took longer to dissolve compared to the Pregnyl (from my first IVF cycle). Novarel seemed to be a lot more chunky. Remember not to shake the vial, but to instead gently rotate it until it dissolves.

The shot wasn’t that painful, maybe a 3 out of 10, and that’s coming from someone who has a low pain tolerance. I had mom give me the injection since it’s in an awkward spot I couldn’t see, and I wanted to make sure it got in there correctly. To me it feels just like a progesterone shot, so it wasn’t that bad. It just looks intimidating with how long the needle is. We did the shot exactly at 9pm, the time they told us to. So it turned out well. I felt a lot of relief knowing I was all done for this round and the only thing I need to do now is to show up for the surgery.