Well it’s starting to look like I might have two lead follicles (14 mm and 15 mm), and a trailing cohort of six much smaller follicles (between 8 to 9 mm). This isn’t what you hope for. What it means is that you either do an egg retrieval very soon and collect only two follicles, or you wait an indeterminate period of time for the trailing cohort of follicles to grow and let the lead follicles get overcooked. It might seem like an obvious choice to collect 6 follicles instead of 2, but those 6 might never mature and then you’d have zero. And I’ve seen some sources say that the lead follicles are the higher quality ones anyway, most likely to survive to implantation.
So it’s not ideal. We may have to do another cycle and tweak the meds so that I can get more even growth across all follicles. But before then, I am going to push for doing an egg retrieval if at all possible. At age 38, I can’t really afford to cancel a cycle. Two eggs are two eggs (all it takes is one!) so it doesn’t make sense to let anything go to waste. Especially not time.
There is still hope for the trailing cohort though. The Dr. is upping my Gonal F dose to 450 units (up from 300 units) in hopes of encouraging growth of those six. If we see a good response tomorrow or Friday, then the path forward will be more clear. If they don’t respond well, we’ll retrieve the leading two and just call this IVF round an educational experiment, and try again (or just get extremely lucky and get a healthy embryo from those two).
There are many ways forward, and baby is in there somewhere, I’m certain of it!
Yes, your baby is in there, just waiting to be discovered. <3 <3 <3