Cycle review.

Since I found other IF blogs extremely helpful in anticipating what, exactly, might lie ahead in my TTC journey, I figured I'd recap my protocol in a little more detail. Along with some pictures that may or may not make you want to wet yourself in fear.

This cycle was a full injectables cycle, so all my meds, obviously, came from a syringe. Sometimes you can have a partial injects cycle, as an aid for oral meds, but since Clomid thinned my lining this wasn't a good option for me. I took 37.5 iu of Bravelle every night from cd3-14. Not everyone stims this long, in fact, I don't think I've seen anyone on the message boards with this protocol for an IUI cycle, but hopefully that means they were all successes and have moved on.

Bravelle comes in 75iu vials, which you need to reconstitute yourself. If you are interested in what this means exactly, along with how to inject it, watch this video (click Bravelle in the meds list). This is what my protocol involved (keep in mind this is only part of it):

And here is what R needed:

Real fair, huh?

So starting on cd3 I began the Bravelle. Most of the injections weren't that bad and by the last one I could do it standing up. I did have one that must have been to close to a vein and here is what it looked like a week later. Ouch!

Meanwhile, being on injectables meant more monitoring...so I had 6 appts for b/w and ultrasounds, not including my baseline. Unluckily I got a few not so careful lab techs this cycle, so by appt #4 both arms looked like this.

I didn't think to take a picture of the endometrin, but maybe I'll add that so you can get a true appreciation of the size of the stupid pill.