Last night M & I had planned a special evening for the two of us at Claude’s, our favourite restaurant in the world, for a romantic and decadent dinner to celebrate our first full day of officially being married (we had to apply for the Thai marriage to be recognised here and now it is – we’re legal hoorah!)
But those cheeky chickens had other ideas!
Our first day of being legally hitched was full of hitches. At 7am I visited Casa Conception where I immediately broke my marital vows by being unfaithful to my husband with Dildocam. The Cow wasn’t there this time and instead I got a wand waver who was so irritatingly chirpy for 7am that I wanted to beat her to death.
M was understanding about my morning indiscretions with Dildocam and even drove me home afterwards. We then went to meet with two of my most fabulous friend’s for lunch… except I couldn’t sit still because my boobs were killing me. I swear to Gods they’ve doubled in size in 24 hours. This is not a good thing. They were so big before this that they had their own weather system… now they’re bloody enormous and I swear I saw a satellite orbiting them.
Anyway at the end of our lunch I got a call from Nurse Sweetness-and-Light (she’s new and I like her very much) to let me know my results were back from the bloodwork and DC.
She casually dropped that it was trigger time.
Tonight.
At 11pm.
Fuck me.
It’s only day 9 of the FSH injections… it’s supposed to be 12 or 15 days. And I have things to do. I’m not ready… could it really be happening? I’m scared. This is the money shot…. the last injection of them all.
Plus I really, really want to go to Claude’s.
Nurse Sweetness-and-Light , sensing correctly that I was shitting myself, calmly explained that the hens are laying ahead of schedule and everything is on track (my chickens are so efficient) and my estrogen levels are a sky high 11,000 (meaning a possible risk of OHSS, eek!) which explains why it feels like I’ve had bulldog clips attached to my nipples for the past 24 hours. As such, my doctor (a little more on him shortly) says it has GOT to be tonight with retrieval in 36 hours.
She then gave me an over the phone walk through of just how ‘Trigger’ works.
Now Trigger, as well as being Roy Rogers’s loyal horse, is the final step in the battery farming process. This is the injection that brings on ovulation. Trigger has been sitting menacingly in our fridge for ten days and is complex and scary requiring equipment and mixing which makes me feel like I really am about to shoot up something illegal.
Nurse Sweetness-and-Light told us that first we have to snap open the two little glass vials, draw up the solution with a syringe so long and fat it makes me faint just looking at it, mix it with a powder solution, suck it back into the syringe, change to a smaller needle (whilst breathing huge sigh of relief) ensuring there are no air bubbles then finally inject the lot (and it is a lot) into my gut. What fun!
So that’s how we found ourselves as born again newlyweds dining at Claude’s with an esky bag full of medication stuffing our faces at light speed so we could be home by 11pm and not have to shoot up in the middle of a three hat restaurant.
Having explained the urgency to the wonderful Claude’s staff they raced about, watching clocks and making sure we missed out on nothing… to the point of force-feeding us the dessert courses with such haste I felt like a fois gras goose.
At 10.30 we were eight courses down and on to the petit fors and coffee whilst the rest of the restaurant patrons were leisurely enjoying about course number five and staring at us like we were gluttonous super heroes. By 10.35 pm a waiter was valiantly leaping head first into Oxford Street traffic to get us a cab in to which we immediately dived and demanded the driver get us home post haste.
At 10.52pm we raced (well waddled as we were full to overflowing with yummy Claude’s goodness and about two tonnes of freshly shaved truffles) through the door, trying to put Trigger together. We smashed a vial as we were opening it and threw away the special sucking up syringe by accident from all our fumbly nerves. Thank Gods they give you spares for just such an emergency.
I paced nervously while M cooked up my drugs and then settled onto the couch, needle in hand, trembling with hope and fear. As I shakily started to swipe my stomach with the alcho wipe ready for the plunge… a sudden burst of music entered our living room making me look up to see M, I kid you not, putting on the Trainspotting DVD for moral support.
So to the energetic and rather appropriate strains of the Stooges classic ‘Lust for Life’ I plunged Trigger into my very full belly and cuddled up to my very funny and charming ex IVF drug dealer and now completely legal husband to watch a movie I’ve seen a dozen times but through new eyes.
On Monday at 10.30am I have to be at the Doctors surgery, for the egg retrieval.
The one thing I’ve never discussed during this whole process is my doctor, a lovely man from Scotland with a fabulous accent. Ironically, from the day we met him many months ago while we were still only considering this journey… we have been referring to him as Dr. Sickboy, because his voice sounds spookily similar to that of the Johnny Lee Miller character from Trainspotting, of course.
Mummyfied 