Well, I look knocked up but I aint

Stim meds are a miracle made from bald eagle tears and licorice. They are also a curse at the same time. That tiny bit of meds is meant to put your ovaries into santa’s workshop style overdrive, making the elves work a mile a minute to provide you with a bazillion follicles. When working correctly, a follicle is a sack that contains an egg; sometimes you get some duds.

~7 follicles on one side; ladies with PCOS have about 2,301 on each side (crazy ovary town)

Once on stims you go in to see Wanda every few days to see how the effectively they are working, counting all the growing follicles. Each day you hope to hear an extra number and measure how big they are getting. Mind you, the follicles look like holes on the ultrasound, so you’re essentially rooting for big gaping holes to look larger and larger. You’ve never thought something so small would be so important to you. They SHOULD be adjusting your meds if you have too many follicles or too little, wanting to avoid overstimulating and the dreaded OHSS (think 6lbs of fluid in your belly).

Well folks, while your ovaries are producing 10-30 follicles, when they are used to only trying to get one egg out there into the lady part universe, you tend to look like you ate a truck load of pop rocks. Your stomach turns into a huge ball of gross. That’s right, you look pregnant while trying to get pregnant hoping no one looks at you and thinks you are pregnant.

The worst feeling in the world after spending years trying to get pregnant is gaining a bunch of weight in your stomach so someone thinks you are actually pregnant (and you’re not). Yup, that tops the time when I went to the threading place to get my brows done and was greeted at the door with “upper lip?”.… yup, no contest.

Silver lining, I could rest my egg nog on my ginormous belly