Ok so after a month of stabbing yourself with needles and pasting a fake smile on your face at work, what can you expect to happen?

The IVF egg retrieval process will come at the end of your cycle. You’ll have already been monitored pretty heavily up to this point with nurses tracking how the hormone injections are helping your multiple eggs to grow. The idea is more eggs, more chances since not all of them will grow at the same rate and not all of them will make it through the harvest or retrieval process. I had about 10 eggs large enough when we reached the tipping point of deciding to schedule my retrieval.

Around your retrieval date be prepared to go into your clinic for check-ins every day to two days. They’re trying to time the exact right window to bring you in and when they decide when that will be, you’ll likely only have a day or two of warning. You’ll want to take the day off so make sure you’re covered at work which isn’t easy when you don’t know exactly what day you’ll need off.

Once your clinic determines the right day, you’ll be asked to pause your regular medication schedule at some point and will be asked to take a trigger shot about 12 hours ahead of your scheduled retrieval. Then it’s go time.

What happens on the day of your retrieval?

My clinic asked to have someone accompany me to take me home after my retrieval because of the pain killers and sedatives I’d be on.

I headed into the clinic first with my father coming in later to pick me up (yay having a supportive family!). When I got in, I was taken to a private waiting area where I had to change into a hospital gown and booties.

Once you’re in your gown, a nurse will come in and give you the run down of basic questions. Allergies, confirming your donor number, after care, etc. Then they’ll tape an IV into your hand to make injecting medications easier.

The first thing you’ll get is some medication to relax you before you head into the OR. Yes, it looks like hospital ORs. Think Grey’s Anatomy. Mine had one right in the clinic, but you may be directed to an actual hospital for this procedure depending on your clinic’s setup.

A nurse brought me into the OR and helped me onto the bed where my legs were put up in stirrups. I was given fentanyl in advance to help with any pain and maaaaaan did I not feel pain lol. Sometimes saying yes to drugs is the answer.

The retrieval doctor came in to introduce herself with her two nurse team and then it was time to get started.

An ultrasound probe was inserted to identify the follicles they’d be retrieving. From there a thin needle is inserted into the ultrasound guide to target those follicles and sort of suck them up. For a more technical explanation, check out the Mayo Clinic.  

The process took about 15 minutes for the doctor to find and extract the follicles or eggs that were large enough for removal. I had about 10 going in and she was able to retrieve 7.

In terms of what this felt like, I felt pressure but no pain. My doctor was quick and efficient and the nurses were monitoring me very closely. You are conscious for this process so you’re aware of everything happening, but thanks to the sedatives it’s a little hazy. It’s more of a “stare at the ceiling and think good thoughts” sort of process.

Once as many eggs are retrieved as possible, the ultrasound and equipment is removed from you, along with the speculum. Your eggs are taken away to be fertilized and you’ll be asked to lay there for a few minutes while they check that they’ve gotten all the eggs they can out of the suction needle. Once they confirm that, back you go to the recover area to sit in your chair and basically pass out for a little bit.  

Once I was a little more with it, my nurses checked on me until they deemed me able to get dressed and go to the waiting area where my father could take me home.

What was happening to the eggs? Well at this point you’d choose how many eggs to fertilize in case you wanted to freeze some without sperm for later use with a potential future partner. With a funded Ontario round, you don’t get that option. You have to fertilize all your eggs with your sperm sample. So my 7 retrieval eggs all got a dose of my donor. Note, you only need to use one sperm sample per IVF round.

I was told I’d get daily updates on how my eggs were doing and that was pretty much it.

I was a little groggy by the time I reached my father and when I got home it was straight to bed to sleep off the rest of the drugs. I’d highly recommend not trying to go back to work. I know I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

Aftercare for IVF retrieval

You might feel some cramping or pressure after your retrieval. It sort of felt like period cramps to me. Nothing too bad, but I didn’t feel like dancing a gig, let’s put it that way. Lay down if you can and take things slow.

By the next day I felt normal and went back to work with no problem.

What happens to your eggs once they’re retrieved?

From the second day I started getting my updates. A nurse would call to say how many eggs had made it and once fertilized, how many embryos. I started with 7 being retrieved and for two days that number remained the same. Then two embryos died and I was down to 5. Then shockingly 3 more bit the dust. All that pain and all that hell for what ended up being 2 viable embryos which were then frozen for later use.

Was it worth it?

Honestly, I don’t know. I was pretty shocked by the outcome as all my tests had been good going in and all my monitoring said I was on track. To go from 10 possible eggs to 2 viable embryos seemed like a radical drop. So radical I do wonder if there was lab error involved since my clinic was a trainwreck for the most part. If I had known going in that $15K would deliver two embryos I don’t think I would have jumped into IVF so fast and would have stuck with IUI for a few more months.

However, hindsight is 20/20 right? Not much I can do about it now.

What’s the next step in the process?

Now you have a choice. You can do an immediate embryo transfer while the embryo is fresh or you can freeze them from later use. I did the latter as I wasn’t going to be ready for the transfer for a few months.

An embryo transfer is a whooooole other thing which I wasn’t warned or prepared for. More on that in the next blog. For now, I just wanted to relax for a bit after the month of needles and hormones. I had made it through the hardest part (I thought) and was ready to think about something else for a bit.

For anyone getting to this step, hurrah for you! It’s certainly not easy, physically or emotionally, and not cheap. I personally needed a break before I could think about moving forward with getting pregnant and with Christmas coming up, I just wanted to spend some quality time with loved ones before moving on to the next stage.