Part 2 begins with my first egg freezing (or stim) cycle. Why am I calling this my first? Well let’s just say the end of this cycle culminated into one of the lowest periods I’ve experienced in my life. In retrospect, January is probably not the best time to start anything. You’re coming off the highs of the holidays right back to the dead of winter. However, there’s probably never an ideal time to start a cycle, so you just need to get on with it when it feels right for you.

I was actually very sick all of January after catching the flu on the last day of 2023. Luckily I wasn’t due back at work until later in the week, but I spent the start of the year sick in bed. Even after most of my flu symptoms were gone, I couldn’t shake off the lingering cough. At first I was worried that could affect my egg freezing cycle, but after consulting with the nurses I was given the go-ahead.

I started my first subcutaneous injections after finishing my day 3 bloodwork and ultrasound. I was given a medication calendar and my prescriptions in advance, so I had everything I needed to begin. However, one of the tricky things about fertility drugs (aside from the fact that they’re not covered by many workplace benefits) is that they’re not always readily available at the local pharmacy.

A typical stim cycle lasts about 10 days. Since you’re going in for monitoring every second or third day, sometimes the doctor will review your bloodwork in the afternoon and tell you you need to up the dosage that night or maybe start a new injection earlier than planned. This means you need to have enough medication on hand as the pharmacy requires time to place the order. Majority of patients probably buy directly from the fertility clinic for this reason, but because I have a family member who’s a pharmacist, I was able to get the drugs AT COST. Since I was paying out of pocket for everything, getting a single 300 IU pen of Gonal with no mark up saved me about $60 per pen. Fertility drugs cost a fortune, so saving where you can definitely helps, but it means you have to coordinate everything in advance.

As everything on paper looked good when I started, I was put on a lower dosage of Gonal and Menopur, which were the injections I took in the evening. I had no clue how to inject myself or to mix the Menopur powder with the diluent, so I went to the pharmacy that night and got the pharmacist to walk me through it. The Gonal pen is the most straightforward out of all the injections. You literally turn the knob to the required dosage then inject. 

Menopur was easy to mix with the Q-caps once you got the hang of it. The clinic did provide online modules that I had to complete prior to starting my stim cycle, including how to prep and give yourself injections. However the thing with injections is, it doesn’t hurt less the more times you do it, it hurts just as much each time. Menopur also burns as you push the plunger down, so that was the injection I hated the most. I read that some people try to ice the area before and after, but I didn’t end up trying that myself. There were a handful of times I saw blood at the injection site when I pulled the needle out, which isn’t a huge cause for concern. (Although I was indeed concerned when it happened the first time.) There was another time I nicked a capillary, which gave me a nasty bruise afterwards.

As I mentioned I was paying out of pocket for everything and was trying to save money where I could, the one trick I was taught was to buy Gonal pens in 300 IU instead of 900 IU to use the overfill in each pen.

For example: Say you were prescribed 200 IU a night and you were stimming for 9 days. In theory, you would need six pens of 300 IU or just two pens of 900 IU to equal 1800 IU total. The cost is the same, but you would need to inject yourself nine times with 300 IU pens versus only six times with 900 IU pens. Why would someone want to stab themselves more? Well, most pens come with overfill, containing anywhere from 25-75 IU. The more pens you have, the more overfill there is. So there’s a good chance you can get by with just FIVE pens of 300 IU, instead of six, to last you the entire 9 days. If the difference in one pen can save you a couple hundred dollars, it’s probably a good tradeoff.

Anyway back to my cycle – I thought I was doing pretty well and adjusting to all the changes with my body. Clearly I was still pretty sick, but it seemed like I was responding to the medication. It wasn’t until Stim Day 6 when I got my ultrasound results back that the number of follicles I had did not reflect the amount that was growing. Regardless, the nurse told me to start my morning injections that day. So far I’d only been doing the injections at night to help stimulate my ovaries to produce more eggs. The morning injections however, helps delay ovulation by preventing your eggs from being released too early. I was put on a dose of Cetrotride to start that day.

However, by the time my blood test results came back that afternoon, my doctor had decided it would be best to cancel the cycle because I had a surge in hormones and was starting to ovulate. That meant there was no time to wait for additional follicles to grow. Needless to say I was devastated. I thought I had already made it to the halfway mark and for the plug to be pulled at that moment meant that all the injections I had given myself up to that point were useless.

Obviously the monetary loss hurt. It wasn’t just the cost of the drugs, but also the monitoring fees I needed to pay to the clinic. However, even that wasn’t as bad as the emotional and physical toll it took on me. Being on high doses of hormones didn’t help, so it was like a sucker punch to the gut. And despite having a clear chest x-ray, I still couldn’t shake off the lingering cough. Then I ended up catching a cold in the last week of January. Being sick since the start of the year while going through this privately, was probably one of the toughest periods I’ve had to go through in my life.

Thankfully once February came around I was doing much better physically and mentally. I think I felt more like myself a week after my last injection and most of the hormones were out of my system. My period did end up coming a week early and I could have technically tried again then, but I decided to give my body a break and postpone my next egg freezing cycle until the next round.

It seems a lot easier to write about this experience now than when I was living in the moment. Things do happen for a reason and I don’t think I would have been happy if I proceeded with a retrieval if the results weren’t going to be good. It took a while to come to terms with everything, but I was still certain I wanted to try again. More to come in the next post.