Lucky 39

39: A random channel on the television, a temperature a bit warmer than freezing, a famous pier in San Francisco, and the number of eggs they collected from me yesterday!  Even the nurse did a double take when she overheard the number.  "Did I hear that right? Did that girl really have 39 eggs?"  Someone please call the Guinness Book of World Records! Take a picture!  It's no wonder I've felt like a giant hot air balloon for the past few days.  39 eggs!!!  For frame of reference, the average, healthy woman my age has around 16-18 eggs for retrieval.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Based on that number the Dr. said it was a good move to go ahead and postpone the transfer until October.  The likelihood of hyperstimulation after this procedure is pretty high, so better safe than sorry!

The surgery process overall went well.  Rick and I spent a lot of time laughing beforehand about how we should probably get to know the other patients on the floor.  With our luck, the doctors will end up fertilizing Rick's sperm with some random woman's eggs.  It would be nice to say hello and wish her well!  Rick also thought it was hilarious to closely monitor my heart rate via the monitor I was hooked up to.  He quickly realized that every time a doctor or nurse walked in the room, my heart rate sped up, then immediately fell upon their exit.  He spent the next 30 minutes giving me my heart rate play by play. HILARIOUS RICHARD.  The procedure only lasted 20 minutes and an hour and a half later I was awake and ready for some food.

Rick brought me home and had to shoot off to work for a big meeting he couldn't miss, so my amazing Aunt Becky came over to take care of me.  Here are some flowers she brought me from her beautiful garden.

She also spent the afternoon making me chicken noodle soup.  It was delicious!! Thank you Aunt Becky!

We just got some great news involving our embryos.  The lab just called and of the 39 eggs, 31 were mature.  Of those 31, they successfully completed ICSI to produce 27 embryos!!  SUCCESS!  ICSI is a process where they inject one sperm into each egg as opposed to letting the sperm figure it out themselves.  We're done letting things "work out on their own" so bring on the ICSI!  Now they culture them and hope that many will survive to become blastocytes.  By Monday or Tuesday the survivors will be frozen.  We're very relieved we have so many at this point.  Seeing as though we don't plan on becoming the Dugger family in this lifetime, we won't need all 27.  So things are looking up!

Thanks to everyone for their love and support.  Family and friends mean the world to us!