
Blood drawing bruise
F began the medications to suppress her hormones in August, and the weekend before Labor Day I got the green light to begin stims. They were treating me as my own egg donor, so the goal was to obtain as many mature eggs as possible from me.
One of the reasons we decided to pursue surrogacy was because I supposedly stimulated well. Obtaining good eggs that made good embryos hadn’t been a problem in the past. Well, you know what they say about best laid plans. In short, I had the cycle from hell.

bruised stomach
I finally started responding to the drugs after several days and felt cautiously optimistic; then my estrogen dropped, which is never a good sign. They upped my dosage again, and my hormone levels began to increase again. Every day I was at the lab in the morning for bloodwork and ultrasound. My arms soon looked like a junkie’s.
Fearing cancellation at any moment, I cried constantly. I couldn’t eat and subsisted on the odd combination of smoothies and salt and vinegar chips (not together). I was baffled. Why wasn’t I responding? I felt like I had waited a year only to get to the starting line and find I was out of gas. If the cycle was cancelled, I would have to wait 2-3 months to try again.

after IV

Three embryos we transferred
And then we had the LONG 14 days until beta day. F could test all she wanted, but we agreed that she wouldn’t tell us the outcome until the official beta results were in. I started feeling a little bit better about the cycle when I found out that we had 5 embryos make it to freeze. J’s birthday was two days before beta, so we had a low-key celebration and planned to celebrate for real afterwards. And then came beta day…