Thanksgiving day, we welcomed our daughter, Josephine Robin, into the world! I tried to take notes during labor and wrote up her birth story when it was fresh, but haven’t gotten a chance to post it (#newmomlife). This is going to be quite long, since Josie’s birth was anything but straightforward. Luckily, the birth was the hardest part and she’s an actual dream baby (so far!), but more on that later.

Right after retrieval we were told that they had managed to collect 24 eggs. This seemed like a great number to me, and we expected to get a good haul as I was young and had responded to the medication well. Twenty-four seems like a huge number, and comparably it is, but during each stage of development, you can expect about 30% drop off. So from our 24 retrieved, not all would fertilize, and not all of those would develop, and not all of those would reach the 5-day blastocyst stage which is what’s required for transfer.

At the end of your stim phase, you’re given a different medication called a “trigger shot”. This is administered exactly 36 hours before your egg retrieval is scheduled and lets your ovaries know that it’s time to mature the eggs and prepare them for release. Before they are actually released, the procedure is performed to aspirate each of the eggs out of their follicles. The follicles have grown to be about 20mm at the largest, and usually at least 14mm if they are containing a mature egg, and they’ll continue to grow after the trigger shot, but the eggs themselves are still microscopic.