Tracking scan – When you go to your clinic for a date with Wanda* to see how your ovaries are doing during your stims injections (remember – those are the injections that stimulate your ovaries to produce more follicles which each should house an egg… the more good-sized, healthy follicles, the more eggs you are likely going to get at egg collection). You want a good amount of follicles at a good size a few days before your egg collection as this is a good indicator of how your egg collection might go.
*Wanda is the name given the to medical instrument that is use to give you an internal scan up your Vagina. The name is given by women in the TTC community who know all too well what Wanda does!
So on Monday 26th October, we went for our Tracking Scan. I think I felt quietly confident because I have good AMH (Ovarian reserve – how many eggs I have left), I have been eating well, I’ve been having acupuncture for IVF, people on Instagram always seem to have a good, high number of follicles so of course I thought I would be fine… I don’t think I acknowledged that I felt quietly confident until afterwards, when it really didn’t go the way I expected.
As soon as the lady found my follicles with Wanda, I could see on the screen there were only 3 or 4… *Warning bells triggered in my head*
When I have seen pictures on people’s follicles, there have always been loads. They absolutely did not look like this.
“Ah, there they are! They’ve still got a bit of growing to do….”
***Warnings bells begin to ring even louder in my head***
We are 2 and a half days away from trigger shot and 4 days away from egg collection. All she could find was 7 OK sized follicles that still need more time to grow.
From everything I have seen online, on Instagram, Facebook etc. I have always seen women with a much higher number of follicles, and much bigger too.
I asked if we would still be going ahead with egg collection on Friday and she said we will but that I will up my dosage of the stimulant drug.
And when I asked her whether she thinks we will still be able to get some good, mature eggs, she umm’ed and ahh’ed and said that we might get about 6.
Now, 6 is a good number for a lot of women. But I have a good AMH level, which means I should be able to produce more eggs. The higher number of mature eggs, the better your chances are of eggs fertilising and being put back in as an embryo.
This picture here is one of my actual ovaries. The black holes you can see in the middle are my follicles in the ovary. So somewhere inside there are my little eggies!
So it’s fair to say that I was absolutely gutted. We even asked if there was a chance to have another scan in 2 days to see if it was worth delaying egg collection by 2 or 3 days but they have decided I don’t need that. They even said that my results were “expected”.
What is really difficult is that because of Covid, we have had little contact with our clinic. As our first cycle, we would love to have known what is supposed to happen at each stage and what they would “expect” from our situation. So all I had to go over and to set our expectations against was what I had seen online.
Another disappointment is that they started me on a very low dosage of stimulating drugs because of my good level of AMH; they didn’t want me to have OHSS which is understandable. But perhaps they have started me on too low a dosage which is why I haven’t responded as well as I expected.
I even spoke to my lovely acupuncturist afterwards and she said she too was disappointed with my results. with my demographic, really I should have had more.
I am gutted. Now instead of feeling quietly confident, I am filled with fear and heartache again.
There is a part of me that is still holding onto hope for this Friday. I hope and pray that God will step in and we will still end up pregnant after this, even if we have small numbers. Even if it doesn’t work, God will still be good.
Journeying to Family 