Over easy with toast, please

A perfect muumuu specimen; I would prefer a bit more color though.

As we geared up for our first egg retrieval I was taking up to four injections a day. These meds caused my ovaries to go into overdrive, making 10+ eggs each, instead of the usual one total. With that came a ginormous buddha belly that had me contemplating the purchase of maternity pants for work. I’ve heard that maternity pants are made of unicorn tears and threads from Beyoncé’s favorite outfit; in other words they are stupid comfortable. With that and knowing I value comfort over all else, if I put a pair of these magical pants on there would be no turning back… with or without a baby on board. So living in yoga pants and stretchy work skirts would have to do. I also contemplated moving to Hawaii so I could wear a muumuu for all of eternity, as it’s acceptable there (at least I picture it to be).

Fat pants aside, I was a freaking emotional mess. I’m still not quite sure if I scream cried a lot because of the meds, the stress, or both. Either way I blamed it on the meds.

If memory serves me well, I was on all the stimulation meds for about 3 weeks, and the closer we got to the egg retrieval surgery the more often I required to be in for labs and Wanda time (the transvaginal uktrasound) so we could count the follicles (egg sacs) and make sure I wasn’t overstimulated. Overstimulation results in about 2-10lbs of fluid ending up in your abdomen, a nice trip to the hospital, and sometimes a drainage or surgery. Thanks, but no thanks.

“So you’ll need to come in three days this week”, says Dr. Babymaker. Ok, cool. Sure. No problem. If you recall, I travel to clients all over the country each week and working remote is frowned upon. Of course I didn’t tell my boss or coworkers about our treatment, so I had to juggle the work, the meetings, my schedule, and the lies. I truly hate lying, and I’m pretty effing terrible at it. Stress atop of stress, heavily caked on stress. Sure I was a treat to deal with home.

It wasn't until my second round of IVF that I told my boss, and I only told him because he assigned me to a project in Miami during the Zika frenzy. Essentially I was forced into telling him, and let me tell you… that shit wasn’t remotely as hard I thought. He said, “in the grand scheme of things, this project doesn’t matter”. From then on I was able to let them know I had appointments, surgeries, and some time alone with Wanda. A weight was lifted and I was able to focus on work and pissing on pregnancy tests in airport bathrooms.

Thought I would share this little checklist, and let me tell you this shit is as accurate as ability to guess who the killer is in every episode of Castle. If you don’t think so, just check out the Bad Advice column…. BOOM!