Weekly Rundown: And So It Begins...

It's been a bit of an interesting week here at Chez Click, not least because we are Officially Officially started on the IVF now. I realise that we officially started in March, and then Officially started in May, but now it's June and now we're Officially Officially started.

But before I get to this I must tell you something important. Last week one of our ferries caught fire. I wasn't on the ferry at the time, but as you can imagine it caused some problems for the poor people on the ferry at the time. It's also caused some problems for all the people who weren't on the ferry because while that ferry is off being fixed we're down to just one. And when you're used to having boats pretty much every hour, having one every two hours is quite the inconvenience.

Especially when you have hospital appointments.

And there's bad weather forecast!

But more on that in a minute.

As you know, Friday before last I started taking my Metformin pills which I've managed on just fine and I was given the instructions to double my dose after a week as well as to call when I got my period. Well guess what showed up early last week? So a hospital appointment was scheduled for yesterday, at 9:30am.

Now you can imagine that having boat issues would be enough of a problem but by mid-morning on Friday the CalMac website was already warning that the boats might be disrupted by the bad weather. It's kind of hard to believe that we're at the beginning of June right now. It's been so cold, wet and windy!

There may have been some panicking on Friday night. There may also have been some frantic googling in search of hotels and hostels so I could travel over that night to make sure I was in Glasgow for the morning. Ultimately we decided to just keep everything crossed that we would get off the island and if the main boats weren't running, we'd have to drive the long way round.

Luckily it didn't come to that. Although the crossing was rather unpleasant, we made it with time to kill (special mention to Mr Click for managing to drive to the hospital without any problems).
It was actually really weird being in the hospital on a Saturday. There was virtually no one around. We got in pretty quick and first port of call was my scan. That's an internal one with my old friend, the Dildo Cam, to assess the womb lining. I also discovered I have a little cyst on my left ovary which shouldn't interfere with the treatment at all but did look kind of cool on the screen.

With that out of the way we were on to the next item of business; the drugs. I had been given a sheet with my protocol on it, but I'd been focused on taking things one point at a time so hadn't read on past the Day 3 scan bit. Turns out that Day 3 is also the day for the injections to start, as I learned after having another vial of blood taken. It was a bit of a shock.

An even bigger shock was the discovery that these injections are done with actual needles. When we tried it before we used Gonal-F which comes preloaded into a pen; this time around I'm on two different drugs (Menopur & Cetrotide) both of which come in little vials of powder. You have to add the water from the syringe to the vial yourself, draw it up and then inject it. It's a little daunting but the nurse did the first vial for me, handed the syringe to me and told me to go wild. Well, not quite, she just kind of looked at me encouragingly and I did it all by myself.

I'm a bit of a pro at stabbing myself in the stomach with needles now, though I have to say the one I did this morning was really stingy. It's harder to actually get the needle in and then halfway through the injection it stung and I stopped pressing the stopper bit before I realised that at that point, the only thing you can do is keep going.


I've got another scan at the end of the week to see how we're getting on, then we'll hopefully have a better idea of when egg retrieval is likely to be. I'll be sharing updates on the Click's Clan Facebook Page so stop by if you're curious.