New Year, New Hope

And I'm not talking about Obama!
I am excited and nervous to report that we have taken a major step in our family planning and have just undergone an egg retrieval for our first (and hopefully last0 IVF Cycle. I have been going through about a month of daily injections, frequent doctor's visits and blood draws, not to mention all the pill-popping, but hopefully we are getting to the beginning of the end.
Yesterday Dr. B extracted 9 eggs from my ovaries and today I received the fertilization report over the phone. They said that 6 of them were mature and 4 actually fertilized. It might sound like alot, compared to the usual 1 egg per cycle of normal ovulation, but these are actually very low numbers for IVF. Someone my age can usually expect 15 to 20, but I have a low ovarian reserve, so we are quite pleased with the low number we got. It's much better than I expected. We have to wait 5 days total to see if all or any of those fertilized eggs get to blastocyst stage. Sounds very high-tech, well I guess it is. I will be crossing my fingers and trying to stay distracted until Wednesday. In the meantime, I have many projects to do and will fill in more details on this whole IVF thing in future posts.