Day 12: Trigger Time!
My follicles grew a lot! At the ultrasound appointment in the morning, I can see that several are about 22mm with many others around 17mm or 18mm. Hurray! That’s a huge increase from yesterday.
I take my Cetrotide shot to prevent ovulation and then head to the hotel to meet my mom. We check in and I thank her for about the millionth time for being so supportive of me and this process.
I pick up the trigger shot at the pharmacy. It’s actually two shots -- a Lupron trigger (to reduce the risk of OHSS) and a hcG booster of 1000iu to ensure effectiveness. I agree completely with this approach. A regular hCG shot of about 10000 units would be much riskier for me, based on health history and OHSS risk.
I am terrified I’ll mess up the trigger shot and miss the window, which would mean a cancelled cycle. What if I drop the syringe on the floor? I hire a nurse to come to the hotel and give me the trigger shot. There’s only a 10-minute window to do the shot, and it happens late at night. For medical reasons, I’m only doing this egg freezing process once, regardless of outcome. I can’t imagine getting this far with shots and appointments only to mess it up.
Thankfully, the nurse is lovely and everything goes as planned.
Except I wake up at 12:45 a.m. with a pounding heartbeat that feels irregular. I wait and it doesn’t stop.
At the ER they check me out. I explain that I have been taking a lot of fertility drugs. They take pity on me and skip the IV at my request, using just a butterfly needle to poke my bruised vein. The weird heartbeat feeling continues, then subsides around 2:30. Finally I am discharged around 3:30. Maybe it was a weird medication reaction. Maybe it was a reaction to the LH surge itself, which is caused by the trigger shot. Who knows? Exhausted, I drift to sleep.
