step by step ...

This is what actually happened.
Day of egg retrieval (ER): After the ER I felt nauseated and sore and my ovaries felt HUGE and my uterus felt like it was poked with a needle 32 times. So, I went home and slept.
Day 1 post ER: I had a little family thing to go to that afternoon, so i rested all day then set out to have a good time. I still felt sore and swollen and a little bloated, but didn't know exactly that's what i was feeling at the time. I had told the nurse that morning all of this plus I had pains in my chest and shoulders as if i had a cyst burst or gas moving around such as when you have laparascopic surgery. The nurse found this odd since they didn't "put anything in me". This may have been a flag, I don't know since i didn't get to talk to the doctor on this day.

Day 2 post ER: see Day 2 post egg retrieval

Day 3 post ER: This morning i had an appt. with my accupuncturist. I had to drive about an hour to get there and during the commute I felt so bad I almost went straight to the emergency room, but decided to give accupuncture a try first since i was probably over reacting. I had pain like gas cramps, but all over my abdomen. My abdomen started to really become distended. I arrived an hour early to my appt. , so i reclined the car seat and tried to relax. This seemed to help alot. So much so that I didn't feel the need to call the clinic and report all the pain I was experiencing that morning. During my acupuncture session several points on my legs and feet relieved the pain in my abdomen and that relief continued for several hours after my session. I never asked why, but the needles in the 4-gateways were extremely painful.

The doctor called me to give me the embryo report and i told him about all the pain i was in. He said he wanted to see me first thing the next morning.

Day 4 post ER: Weight gain total: 7 lbs. Today I felt even worse. I was finally able to apply the word "bloated" to what i was feeling. How stupid of me! I knew about OHSS, but i guess i was just in denial. I had day five transfer in my mind and nothing was going to come between me and having those beautiful embryos transferred. I started to get worried that it was going to be cancelled and that my blastocysts were going to have to be frozen and that they were going to die. All of this was irrational thinking on my part and I felt stupid when i started to think of what questions I would ask the doctor. Anyway, the pain was unbearable. The term "difficulty breathing" was hard to understand. Denial again! I kept on saying that i didn't have difficulty breathing and i didn't get winded, but then again i didn't do anything to exert myself. They should have made me walk briskly up and down the hall for a minute. So, yes, I had difficulty breathing and i denied it. The doctor did an US and some blood work. US revealed about a liter of extra fluid in the abdomen, my ovaries were (if my memory serves me right) 7 x 9 cm, the norm is around 3 to 5 cm. Therefore, i was classified as having moderate OHSS. 10 cm ovaries would have put me at severe status. My RBC count was around 54% which indicated that my blood fluid volume was low. The doctor said that the blood vessels become "leaky" and they allow the fluid portion to leak into the abdominal cavity. Electrolytes, proteins, etc are depleted. The doctor gave me the choice of being admitted right away and spending the night with an IV in my arm or going home and drinking lots of fluids. I opted to go home. This turned out to be a bad bad choice. I made it home and went to bed right away. When I awoke a few hour later I was so confused and disoriented. Robert was home by this time and he asked me if i wanted to go to the hospital. I didn't know, but he gently pushed me into making that decision and so one of us called the doctor and told him that I wanted to be admitted to the hospital. From here on out things were very fuzzy. I couldn't think straight. I'm hypoglycemic and i couldn't seem to get my blood sugar under control. I know i had something to eat, but obviously not enough, or not the right food.

Arriving at the Hospital: This is where the fiasco starts! We pull up to the ER entrance and a kind man with a staff badge walks out to ask if we need help. Robert asks him where we need to park because his wife is needing to be admitted to the hospital, blah, blah, blah! Well, the guy obviously mis-understands and sends us to somewhere else. To make a long story short, about an hour later we end up at the ER again and end up having to wait another 2 hours to be seen. During this time my blood sugar keeps spiking and dropping after every attempt to head it off, first with orange juice which kept causing cramps and burning in my stomach, then with crackers from the vending machine, then after letting a couple of packets of sugar dissolve in my mouth. At one point I asked Robert to ask the triage nurse to test my blood and give me some glucose or something and to tell them that i felt nauseated. When I saw Robert speak to them and point at me and then saw them give him a barf bag and turn him away, I totally lost it. I started crying uncontrollably and could hardly speak. He tried to calm me down and asked me to try to tell him what I was saying. All I could get out was glucose and assholes I think. All hope had gone out the door when he had turned back with nothing but a barf bag. I remember thinking i was going to pass out on that disgusting floor and that was terrifying to me since i'm slightly germaphobic. I also didn't want to throw up in front of all those people, so I went to the bathroom and i think I walked a little bit in the waiting area. That is when I found the sugar packets. This thank God got me throught the last hour while waiting to be seen by a doctor. I cannot believe the triage nurse did not do anything to help me. Not that I thought that I was more important than the other 50 people waiting to get a bed in the ER, but I thought that I could at least get some kind of help to hold me over until I could be seen by a doctor. This is what my letter is going to be about when I get around to writing it.

Well, I finally get called into the ER and i get all hooked up to the IV and meet Dr. Jeff Goldblum! I then throw up the OJ and cheez-it crackers. All the while we hear people outside my room talking about the OHSS patient! "Really!", they say " ovarian hyperstimulation! I've never seen one of those!" People come in and out saying the same thing over again. "We've never had an ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome patient before" Dr. V (Jeff Goldblum) says, " not many crack-heads coming in here with ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome!" Thus, I become the excitement after a long, busy night of belly aches, psych patients, broken arms and MVA's.

Then after a few more hours, they transfer me up to a room. Once again, when I get in the room, I start to hear whispering in the hall (my room was right next to the nurses station) "OH! Really? OHSS? I've never seen one of those!" The nurse exclaims when she comes in to hook me up to a bunch of stuff, " we don't get to see many OB patients here!" wherever here is suppose to be. I never did find out. Anyway, that is how the hospital visit went. I continued to blow up to 178 pounds. Had a few panic attacks because I couldn't breathe. My skin and muscles were stretched so tight that I wanted to die each time I had to sit up, roll over or move. That is when it hit me that we weren't doing the transfer the next day. Finally! I came to my senses. I realized that my life was worth more than my desire to try to get pregnant at this time. It didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. When my doctor visited me the next day he explained that the FET (frozen embryo transfer) had a 50 to 75% success rate and that I had six beautiful embryos frozen. He also said that the lower rates reported are usually because the best embryos had already been transferred before the others were frozen, so my chances of conceiving were very high. That gave me lots of hope and I felt much better about waiting. I was also excited about getting the opportunity to recover from all the drugs that I had to take and to try to get into some kind of healthy routine both physically and nutritionally. So there we are. I'm on my way to getting healthy.