The Survivor - 4dp3dt

Today I feel like time is finally starting pass normally. Not as painfully slowly as before. The work week is ahead of me and as gruesome as that can be, it typically passes in a blur. Part of the beauty of having an unmanageable workload.
Downton Abbey is playing a large, nay enormous role in my time management. I'm a total junkie. If Maggie Smith and I aren't smirking then it is simply time wasted. Netflix is so crucial to a bearable "two-week-wait." TWW in TTC lingo. There is an hilarious amount of verbiage associated with the IF (infertility) online community. Your husband is your DH - darling husband - and your children are your DS and DD - darling son & darling daughter. There's more, loads more, but the required prefix of "darling" is the one I find the ickiest. A typical post on a TTC form look like this:
DH and I went to the RE yesterday while DS stayed with my MIL. After TTC for 2 years, a diagnosis of PCOS and 2 failed IUIs, we're on to IVF. I'm most nervous about the PIO shots and, gulp, of course the HCG beta!
I'm not translating. It's best that you have no idea what that means. I have never ever called my husband "darling." He is hairy and sometimes farts in bed. While he has many endearing qualities, I could never pin the term "darling" on him.

I did end up getting a call from the embryologist yesterday. Of the 3 embryos we were waiting on, 1 made it to blastocyst stage and was frozen for possible future use. The other two didn't make it past their day 3 development. 3 viable embryos out of 7 mature follicles and 11 total follicles is nothing to write home about. Should this cycle not work out, I have to have a discussion with my doctor about changing medication protocols to encourage better quality embryos. I may never have the best eggs in the hen house but there are medications that tend to work better for those of us with quality issues.
All of this said, I was actually very encouraged by my talk with the embryologist. I had the opportunity to ask about the two 6-cell embryos that were transferred. Both of them had zero fragmentation (parts of cells breaking off) which is excellent. One of them was a Grade 1 (all cells equally sized) and the other was a Grade 1-2 (slight variation in divided cell size) which she assured me was not problematic. If my lone survivor cell was able to keep growing into a blastocyst then why not the healthy (if a little slow - like me) embryos that were actually implanted? No reason. No reason at all. Focus on growing, implanting and hatching. Yup, even human eggs hatch.

Ouch.

I'm sober now. I was blogging while intoxicated yesterday. I keep thinking about how conscious sedation or "twilight sleep" was used during labor. It's hard to believe. I was so out of it during the procedure, I could have no more clapped my hands than assist in getting a baby out of my body. My memory of the procedure is as follows: I asked the nurse how long it would take to feel the effects of the sedative. She replied between one and two minutes. She left the room. Then the ceiling started moving. Then I was dreaming but could also hear the nurses and doctor talking. I could vaguely feel some action going on in my nether regions. At some point the nurse asked me to roll over for my progesterone shot which I miraculously did and thought that it really didn't hurt that much. I woke up back in the recovery area and decided that I'd rather be asleep. I vacillated between sleeping and waking until I was forced to pay attention, dress myself (honestly with the help of J), and float on out of there.
Yesterday I napped and watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. LOVED. I adore India and Judi Dench and these two were wrapped up into one.
Today I got the dreaded/highly anticipated call back from the embryology lab: of the 11 eggs, 7 were mature and, of those, 5 fertilized normally. I gotta say, after all of those drugs, constantly feeling fatigued and mildly crappy, 5 doesn't feel like all that many. I have to remember that I don't need a million eggs. Just a few of good quality and only one to implant. So I'm not disappointed, just not elated.
Here's the thing that is lingering with me today. My ass is killing me. The whole upper third of my left glute (a large, vast swath I assure you) is so blindingly painful that the muscles have been rendered useless. I feel like I'm dragging that leg behind me. This is all from that progesterone shot. For those not in the know, progesterone is suspended in oil (typically peanut if you're curious) and then injected intramuscularly into your buttock or thigh. Many women going through IVF give themselves this injection once a day for up to 10 weeks if they get pregnant. I'm lucky in that my doctor prescribes Endometrin, a vaginal suppository. I think the fact that I just typed that I felt "lucky" to have thrice daily suppositories shows how far I've come. Anywho, I'm either a giant baby and cannot deal with the pain of a single intramuscular shot OR I'm having a bad reaction OR the nurse hit a nerve. Maybe all three. But this is brutal. I crouched to pick something up today and then had a really hard time getting up. I told my colleagues I had pulled a muscle as I fought back the tears. Of all the bullshit I've dealt with during this IVF cycle, this is right up there. I'm going to limp away now.