Have you ever met the dude who goes "Oh is test tube baby the one where you grow the baby in the test tube?"

Anyway.

IVF Intro For Noobs

IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) in a nutshell works like this:

1. They take out the female's ovaries.
2. Your man squirts into a cup.
3. You inject the strong-looking sperms individually into pretty-looking eggs, cultivate them some, get 'em all fertilised and create embryos
4. You put the successful embryos back into the female's womb.
5. Pray hard for the embryos to mature in the womb and grow, grow grow.

That's the summary. Sounds pretty straight forward and easy peasy yes? Wrong.

The details are painful shit.

All the needles I used over the past few weeks. Felt like some kinda junkie

IVF - Slightly longer version on how it works.

Before you enthusiastically yell "Take my eggs!" there are a bunch of steps you need to do to prepare your body for the tribulation. I did the long cycle and here's what transpired.

1. Inject yourself with hormone suppressing drugs called Lucrin on a daily basis. (I did this for a total of 25 days)

2. 2 weeks into the Lucrin injection, also inject yourself with Menopur to stimulate your ovaries to produce follicles on a daily basis for approximately 2 weeks (I injected this for 11 days).

3. Go through Transvaginal Ultrasound to check your follicle count and size every other day after you start on the Menopur injection.

*Transvaginal Ultrasound is painful shit. I dread this part.

4. After they are satisfied that you have an adequate number of follicles of adequate size, they'll inject a final dose of this drug called Impregnyl into your bum.

5. They harvest the eggs a couple of days later.

6. You gotta insert this sticky little white ball progesterone down there for the next few weeks.


Complications / Side Effects

The hormonal side effects from messing with your hormones from Lucrin is relatively a walk in the park. You may or may not get migraine, heat flushes, and some other PMS stuff off-schedule. Personally, I got heat flushes, really bad migraine, and insane thirst for the first few days. It went off after a while.

Then there is this more serious side effect that affects about 1-2% of the women who do IVF called Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome or 'OHSS' in short.

Basically, I struck lottery.


OHSS

OHSS happens when your body reacts way too well to the drugs and produce much more follicles then expected. The hormones go haywire and start pumping liquid around your body. You get all bloated up and god, it hurts like hell. Serious cases will land you in the hospital bed for up to 3 weeks while they pump the liquid out of your system through a tube. Mild cases go away after a while. Mine was probably 5 on the scale of 1-10 in terms of seriousness based on what I read in other forums.

The average number of expected stimulated eggs to be harvested are around 10-15. I had 36 eggs. Well, this was apparently not a case of 'the more, the merrier'. This just meant I was in serious risk of OHSS, which I did eventually get.

More on this brouhaha in The OHSS Ordeal.

The needles all lined up.