All dressed up but not quite ready to go

Thank you.  Yeah, you.  Your support and kind words meant so much.  It was probably the only thing that kept me from curling up in bed and hiding under the covers for a week.

I had braced myself for the worst at my consultation on Wednesday, but overall I think it went well.  My doctor thinks that I responded perfectly to the protocol they used.  The real problem was in the fertilization.  Apparently, it took a long time for my eggs to fertilize.  Some of them didn't fertilize at all, most likely because they had been sitting around in the petri dish too long.  The eggs that did fertilize grew slowly, and were on the small side even when they reached blastocyst stage.  My doctor does not believe that this is a sign of poor egg quality, but that I was triggered too early.  Even though the follicles looked big on the ultrasound and the hormone levels came back at the right level, my eggs are just a bunch of teenagers with fake I.D.s.  They might pretend to be mature, but they're really not.

I am frustrated that my eggs were retrieved so early.  Back in the day when I was doing unmedicated cycles, my follicles were in the 26-28mm range when I got a positive OPK.  At my first medicated cycle, I was told that I'd trigger when I had a follicle at 16- 18mm.  I questioned the doctor twice about this and reminded her that my follicles got much bigger than that.  But she insisted that 16 was mature, and I figured that I wasn't one to question the experts.  Of course I've spent the past few days wondering if my IUIs failed because the doctors have been triggering me too early the whole time.  On the other hand, I'm really hoping that the immature egg theory is the only reason why I'm not pregnant yet.  That seems easy enough to fix.  

Today, I went in for my day 3 scan and bloodwork.  Around noon I got the call that everything looks okay.  So tonight, I took a birth control pill and started IVF round 2.  Bring it on.