The Trip - Part 2
As you know from reading last week’s
entry, treatment wasn’t really going as planned so far. I was meant to have my eggs collected on the Monday, so I would have transfer back on the Friday and be able to fly home Sunday. Due to my body
not reacting very well to the medication, I couldn’t have my eggs collected until the Friday, which meant I wouldn’t be able to have transfer back until the Monday and then fly home on Tuesday. This
meant that we had to extend our trip, which if you remember, no-one really knew why we were there, so our plan to stay inconspicuous was getting harder!! We had a few issues, we needed to extend the
apartment (which ended up being really easy), change our flights (again, ended up being really easy thanks to a doctor’s note and the airline being absolutely brilliant) and extending the car hire.
Which you would have thought out of the 3 would have been the easiest! WRONG! They refused to extend, we could either keep the car and pay a £200 fine for dropping it back late or drive back to
Bilbao airport to swap it, even having told them I wasn’t well enough to travel, they didn’t really give a flying fuck – they still wanted me to drive to the airport. In fact, the woman on the phone
at customer services took pleasure in telling me it’s a standard procedure and told me that they fined a guy for bringing it back late even though his wife had died on the trip – I actually couldn’t
get my breath. What kind of company were we dealing with here?!?! So, we ended up taking out a new car for the last 2 days for something like 20 euros and dropping the car back to them, idiots! The
worst parts were lying to work and family about it. I told work white lies really as I said I wasn’t well to travel following some female issues which was kind of true but I still felt so guilty. I
am so lucky that I have an amazing team of managers at work, so they were all very understanding when the truth finally came out. I was more nervous having to phone them than I was about having the
egg collection!! We told family we were home but that I was staying in London for work – not so much a little white lie rather than a big fat ugly one!! We thought the jig was up on the Tuesday morning before we flew home as my brother rang my Dad and obviously got the abroad tone – we had to make up his phone was playing up
– he didn’t buy it and thought my Dad had buggered off somewhere for a quiet life!
So anyway, here we are!!! Egg
collection day. How exciting and terrifying. We had the whole day to kill as my egg collection procedure wasn’t until the evening, so we went to a local town for a drive out, had a little walk around
and I watched Dad eat and drink basically. Not the most fun I have ever had, especially in the wine and tapas capital of the world (2 of my most favourite things!). The evening came, and we rocked up
at the clinic, we were sat waiting for me to go in for the procedure with “My heart will go on” playing over the speaker, not your standard waiting room music, so it was quite amusing. I got taken in
to the theatre a few minutes later, arse hanging out of the backless paper gown and got up myself up in the stirrups, Dr handsome’s face right up in my vag – beautiful image, I know, I can assure you
it doesn’t feel any more flattering living it than you are imagining it. I had been pretty calm up to this point but even I must admit I was a little nervous at this point, I lay back on the bed and
they put the needle in the back of my hand and told me I was going to the Maldives and off to sleep I went. Liars.
I woke up, only about 20/30 mins later
I believe and felt a little uncomfortable, it wasn’t too bad, but it is uncomfortable. Afterwards when I googled the procedure, I understood a bit more about why it was a bit sore, and I was also
massively grateful I hadn’t googled it beforehand!! Basically, bear in mind I am no doctor, so this is just my understanding from reading about it on google, they have this giant needle attached to a
suction device and they put the needle up inside and then it’s passed through the vagina wall into your ovaries where they go into each follicle and suck out the egg. Yummy. I do have a hilarious
video of me coming around from the anaesthetic chatting absolute shit, asking my Dad is my hair still looked good because “I sell shampoo you know!” I watch it back now and think fucking hell, have a
day off love. But I think the worst part (for my Dad anyway, I think its pretty funny now) was me talking about how the hot doctor has been all up in there so if he was ever interested, there’s no
point now as he’s seen it all! Probably not what a father wants to hear from his daughter. All I could think about when I came around was how many eggs they got, I kept drifting in and out of sleep
but then waking up in a shock asking if we knew how many eggs they had collected yet. In the last part of the video you hear me say “It better be like fucking Easter.”
They managed to collect 4 eggs from me
which wasn’t very high at all, but I did kind of expect that because of how slow my ovaries had reacted to the medication, although I was really disappointed. This meant that I didn’t have a huge
number of chances of the eggs fertilising, being viable, me catching and then maintaining the pregnancy, so I was gutted to be honest. There wasn’t anything I could do but I think I had been so
geared up to have loads of eggs because they said I could have overstimulated due to my PCOS, plus, I had seen loads of women with PCOS in the Facebook group have like upwards of 20 eggs collected –
so I knew my number was low. We then had to wait, we wouldn’t know for at least 48 hours if any of the eggs made it to embryos, so we just went back to the apartment and had something to eat
(finally!) and watched a movie and just chilled for the evening. The next day we decided to go for a nice dinner, it was still a little uncomfortable, but I still wanted to get out and about, you can
tell in my face I was shattered from the procedure, so we just went out for that and then chilled again. I was so nervous about the Monday, I didn’t know what I was going to be walking back into,
would I have any embryos to try with or was all this a waste of time?!
Monday came, and we went to the clinic to be told that 3 eggs had fertilised but one wasn’t strong enough to be put back. I had 2 little embryos!! I was relieved, but again, a little disappointed, they advised they wanted to put 2 eggs back, so again, it was all on this, this was my only shot. If this didn’t work, I didn’t have any in the freezer to get another go at this. But, I had to think positively, I am young and healthy, but the odds hadn’t been that much in my favour so far, so surely it was my time?! So, the 2 precious little embryos were put back, this procedure is very simple, they just put a thing tube up and pop the eggs back, you don’t really feel anything bar a tiny bit of what feels like period pain, and then that’s it. You lay there for 15 mins and then you can go! Last time at the clinic, so we said bye and thanked everyone and off we went back to the apartment for our final night before flying home and returning back to reality with potentially my whole life changed. After the procedure for the next few days I remember being scared to sneeze or cough or anything really in case my 2 tiny, extremely precious and expensive, embryos shot out of me like a fucking pellet gun! Now all I had to do was cross my legs for 2 weeks, which is when I could take a test and find out if this was all worth it…