Holy moly!

My retrieval was yesterday. I haven't posted much because, well, I was kind of dejected.

By stim day 9, my E2 was up to 1400. By day 11, it was up to 2600. I was told that a dozen or so follicles were chugging along. I triggered the night of day 11, making for a ten-day stim period, precisely the same as my first and third IVFs.

By Thursday, Retrieval Day, I was feeling... tender. As in oh-god-I-never-noticed-that-speed-bump-was-quite-so-bumpy tender. I thought maybe this boded well, but I am nothing if not a rugged pessimist.

Retrieval went fine. Cab was eight minutes late, which reduced me to a rage-filled mess, but we got there fine, everything was fine, there was fineness.  As usual, I took the anesthesia flawlessly and woke up in a high good humor. I'm just super lucky in that whatever chemical pathways those drugs are supposed to tread are clearly wide open in my body; I go down like a sack of taters, and wake up like a sack of giggly taters.

I woke up, and eventually my doctor came by to say that he'd retrieved 27.

Whaaaa ---

My peak E2, the morning after trigger, was 3100. The most follicles I'd be told about was 13 or 14. My doctor had decided to switch from the Lupron trigger to the regular hCG trigger, airily saying "there aren't that many follicles, you'll be fine."

Where the hell were all of them hiding, is what I want to know?

It seems I may owe an apology to Dr. Stewart. For my third IVF, he counted 14 follicles and ended up retrieving 23 eggs. I attributed this mismatch to his rather ancient ultrasound equipment. But the ultrasound at Big Shiny Fertility Factor does everything but insert the wand itself. I'm going to have to form some theory that my ovaries are just coy little beasties, and sometimes they don't like to show their eggs until they absolutely have to.

When I heard "27 eggs" I immediately tamped down my expectations by reasoning that, with the E2 so low, most of them couldn't be mature.

Well.  Of the 27 eggs, 24 were mature, and 18 of them fertilized.

This is, in technical terms, awesome.

 So why was the E2 so low? Who knows. This cycle I took an antagonist, which various sources hint can lower estrogen levels and/or make estrogen tests less reliable. All I know is that a lousy cycle, my worst ever, suddenly turned into my best cycle in terms of mature eggs, and my second-best cycle in terms of fertilization (on IVF #1, I had one more).

I'm on OHSS watch, but I don't feel too bad -- tender and swollen, but taking it easy and sipping electrolyte drinks. Finally getting around to watching Legend of Korra (I was/am a huge A:TLA fan). Right now just being quiet, grateful, and wishing my best to the 18 little clumps of cells in a laboratory fifteen minutes down the road.