That first IVF I did a standard suppression, with 3 weeks of birth control pills with the final week of pills overlapping with 10 units of lupron.
My day 3 blood tests revealed FSH of 6.0 and E2 of 59. That E2 number was of some concern because 60 is the the number that they look for the E2 to be below. My doc said that if E2 is too high it makes the FSH number more suspect as an indicator of ovarian reserve. Or, more simply, if the E2 is too high, you can't trust the FSH.
As you may know, clinics want FSH to be under 10. Anything over that is considered an indication of diminshing ovarian reserve.
So we were good to go.
When I started the stims, I cut back to 5 units of lupron. I did 300 units of follistim and 1 of repronex each night. I remember going to the Clam Chowder festival in Santa Cruz at the end of February that year, after only a few days of stims. I could FEEL them working, even though monitoring had not yet begun.
When the monitoring began I think my first E2 was something like 733. (At one point I had all these numbers at a message board where I belong. But they were lost in a great crash.) My RE considered that number very high for day 4, so my meds were cut back. The IVF coordinator told me to eliminate the Repronex.
In the end I stimmed for one less day than they had planned, and I think my meds were cut back once more near the end.
They retrieved 18 eggs. We did ICSI, because of the sperm problems. 12 eggs fertilized. On day 3 we had eight eight-celled embryos that were all A grade. We put back three, and froze five.
