Clever ovaries! I think.

It was quite a bizarre thing arriving at the hospital this morning - no cars in the car park, no patients scattered around outside, the cafe closed, the hospital closed for that matter, more or less, the doors firmly shut and having to be let in by security and have my name ticked off. It felt kinda cool.

The hope on Wednesday after the last scan was that a good number of the great pile of follicles I had would fail to develop and we'd be left with a nice, reasonable amount which would produce lovely eggies out of most of them and the cycle would be straight forward from there.

Ha! Ha ha! But I do mean that in a good way.

This morning's scan showed that in actual fact the reason I feel like I'm going to pop any second is pretty much because I am. Far from failing to develop, the vast majority of follicles have continued to grow and all indications point to there being eggs in most of them. As in, I totally rule at spitting out eggs! For now, anyway. Never mind that I can't stand, sit, lie down, move to very long in any direction, and I look like I'm about 4 months pregnant.

I'll know later on today, but at this point egg collection could well be Monday (eeek!).

Still, clever though my ovaries are, the little bastards have put me at extremely high risk for full blown Ovarian Hyper-stimulation Syndrome which is not so good. So, still clever, but it's a double-edged sword. The good thing about it is that we know it's possibly coming and we can try to minimise complications. If I'd kicked out the standard 8-10 eggs, we'd have been blissfully ignorant until symptoms developed and the possible-pregnancy as well as my own health was at serious risk.

So, what to do?

We'll do egg collection, and at this point we could conceivably (tee hee) end up with around 20ish eggs/ 20ish embryos (it's expected around 70% of the number of eggs will be the number of embryos). Quite an impressive result by anyone's standards (and believe me, they appear to think I'm a complete freak at the hospital as well) - and even more cheerful from the perspective that with that many embryos I may never have to do another fresh IVF cycle as long as I live. But, we won't get ahead of ourselves. Best not to count our follicles until they hatch and all that, and let's face it, it's not exactly been an uneventful IVF cycle over here, and things have certainly not gone according to plan.

Once they've collected all the eggs, they may do something called a "freeze-all" - as in, they won't put any embryo back at all (this was news to me, but actually seems like quite a good idea i the context of the situation). Yet. They will wait for my body to do it's hyper-stimulated thing and settle down properly (a couple to 3 months or so) and then they'll put an embryo back. The good thing about that is that the chance of successful pregnancy is actually higher, would you believe?

So, again we're waiting for a phone call, except this time, we're feeling good.