Final scan and blood test day has arrived and its off to the clinic I go. Being slightly underwhelmed by Northern Cyprus itself and the five star hotel I had thought I would spoil myself with (I have lived too long in the UAE, no one knows how to do 5 stars as well as them!!!) I arrived at the clinic ready to meet the team I have been liaising with over the past few years and the doctor, PLUS most importantly be re-united with my eggs again!!
First impressions of the clinic – modern, clean, friendly all things I had hoped but you never know. In fact the clinic to be honest looked very out of place compared to my experience in Northern Cyprus so far. The IVF industry really is a thing that the region has focused on to attract medical tourism and from what I have seen so far they have done a good job.
Firstly I met with my coordinator, lets call her Betty, she was younger than I had expected. Because I had spent the past few years whatsapping her and planning this trip I had formed a vision of what she would be like in person and she was definitely much younger than I had anticipated. Her English was perfect however and she seemed very knowledgeable, friendly and explained exactly what was happening and when. Bloods were done first and would take 30 mins to get the results, that was the first thing that impressed me just how quickly I would get the results from my blood test. Then I had a scan with the Dr… lets call him Dr Turk. Friendly man, his English wasn’t as good as Betty, but still pretty good. He scanned me, was very pleased with my lining, which was at 0.87cm. He explained that they were looking for a lining above 0.7cm and that mine was excellent and was triple line. He described it as ‘the garden is ready, the weather is good, we now need to do the planting’ not quite sure how I feel about that analogy but was pleased that my bloods and scan were as good as they could be and nice to inject a little humor into a pretty stressful process.
A few tips
I had read a few things about ensuring your uterus lining was thick enough and well prepared and of course I tried to adopt all these things in the lead up to coming to the clinic, from the first day of my last period until this day I worked out every day (apparently working out helps send blood to your uterus area which helps the lining grow… )I was all for that as I love working out!
I drank copious amounts of dandelion tea, took supplements including iron, L-arginine and Vitamin E. I wanted to do all I could to help with a positive outcome. I also took the birth control pill in the month leading up to my period as my period’s had become irregular so this was going to help ensure my period came. During that month I also took prenatal vitamin and 75-100mg aspirin daily. Click here to see the full list of medication I took each day throughout this process.
So on Saturday 12 June on my first visit to the Cyprus clinic, my lining was good, my bloods were good and so it was time to decide how many eggs to defrost. I decided on 8-10 eggs. The actual number would depend on how they were frozen as apparently they arrived from the UK in x4 straws so had been frozen that way.
The next steps were for them to defrost 8-10 of my eggs today (called Day 0) and then I had to wait an excruciating 24 hours to see if any of them survived the thaw and fertilized when they added the donor sperm!
Go and relax at the hotel they told me! A lot easier said than done but I did my best and was lucky that at least the weather was beautiful and I had a lot of personal admin and book reading to catch up on.
Day 1 afternoon at about 3pm I received a whatapp message that said ‘we defrosted 9 eggs, 1 didn’t make the thaw, 4 didn’t fertilize but we have 4 that have fertilized. Now we wait and see if transfer will be Day 3, 4 or 5’….. and so with a little bit optimism and a lot of googling about Day 1 embryos’ and the % that make it to Day 3 and Day5 I waited patiently to find out if there would be a transfer day and if so what day it would be, Day 3, Day 4 or Day 5. Literally like living on egg shells, but I kept telling myself that there was absolutely nothing at all I could do to determine a successful outcome so I should just wait patiently and see what the universe had planned for me. I learnt my lesson the heard way when I was freezing my eggs that you NEVER get your hopes up in this process and even when you think you can you don’t because there are so many possible permutations for outcomes even ones you haven’t yet considered that its best just to take the ‘mini-win’ and then start focusing on the next hurdle…
Day 3 went by and all 4 embryos were still growing, it was only towards the evening of Day 3 that I was informed embryo transfer would take place on Day 4. Of course I had a million questions but communication was limited from the clinic, I assume because they were busy but when this is the most important thing in your world you want to know all the details, why day 4, is that good or bad, can I transfer 2, can I freeze the other 2, how long will I need to be at the clinic for on the day and so on. All I got was a ‘we will tell you tomorrow, be here at 9:30am’. With that I tried to get an early night thinking that sleep was about the only thing I could do to prepare for my big day tomorrow…. Conception day!