I have shared our infertility journey so far & I plan on documenting as much of my IVF experience as possible. I hope that this will benefit couples in the future & I will try to add any tips or tricks I come across as this next month goes by.
Here we go! We just got our schedule for IVF & what we thought would be months of waiting suddenly turned into weeks. Insert nervous laughter!
I couldn’t be happier to finally have a schedule on paper of all of the upcoming appts & shot charts, but to say it didn’t immediately make me want to throw up would be a lie.
I have never had my stomach drop so fast!!
Our scheduling wasn’t as complicated as I imagined, thank goodness! Our nurse did a fantastic job of making it easy to follow.
Birth control for 20 days, Lupron shots for 19, Menopur & GonalF for 9, a few days of antibiotics, & then progesterone.
First of all…that’s a lot of freaking shots!!! As someone who had to take allergy shots growing up, this still freaked me out. I had taken Menopur before for IUI, but adding the others into the mix really made me nervous. Breathe, Ashlee!
Our IVF nurse was awesome & had already called the pharmacy to order our meds. They were delivered within a few days of us getting our schedule.
If you are a MAJOR planner like me, this is key! I didn’t want/need any additional stress of making sure I had my meds in time for us to get started. I wanted to see them, study them, and make sure we had everything in a timely manner before our first shot day! This gave us 8 days to make sure that everything was there before we needed to inject the first shot.
Once I saw the MULTIPLE boxes of medicine & syringes, I felt my panic button switch. My husband cleared off a table in our kitchen & starting organizing it as I sat there playing with bubble wrap, trying to wrap my head around all of this. I think he could tell I was overwhelmed & this little deed of organizing medicine made me love him even more.
One of the benefits of being a ranchers wife is that they administer shots all the time. The needles & medication didn’t phase Mitchell at all. He knew he had a job as Nurse Mitchell & he took full control of it.
After receiving our schedule & meds, I also automatically went out to buy a planner. This was such an adult move for me and I am glad I did it.
My Calendar at work is the only thing I go by, but I knew I would be out of the office quite a bit coming up. I wrote down every apt, every shot, every pill, etc. I know it is 2017 and most people enter events/appts into their phone, but writing it down in a cute planner with a fun pen made this stressful time a little better. It also helped me remember dates and times!
We live 3 hours away from our IVF Dr., so I also went ahead and booked any hotels that we would need in the upcoming month and notified my boss.
The first few days can be overwhelming. I had to keep reminding myself to take a deep breathe, write down any questions, & remember that after this is all said & done, we would hopefully be pregnant.
This was the card we had been given & God was with us every step.
The Casual Me 