Prayers for the Days Ahead

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm very open about infertility in my real life. I don't introduce myself as "Amanda, the infertile", but if a friend or acquaintance in real life asks about our journey, I'm happy to share. Between the blog, word of mouth, Facebook, etc. I sometimes feel as if every single person I know has heard bits and pieces of our story. With that comes a lot of caring souls... I am incredibly blessed!

Tons of real life friends have asked what they can be praying for in the days ahead. So this post is for you guys:

First of all, I feel like I should probably explain what the heck I'm doing down in Jacksonville. Essentially, we're leaving December 26th for our first appointment the morning of December 27th. From there, my doctor will do an ultrasound, draw some blood and decide on the amount of medication I should start taking. The goal is to make a bunch of good great quality eggs. They can't grow too fast or too slow... it's got to be just right! Obviously, each month a woman's body grows and releases one egg (rarely more than one). Well, our goal is to stimulate my ovaries and kind of "trick" them into creating a lot more follicles (eggs).

I'll do injections nightly for several days and the doctors will monitor me every few days to make sure that my follicles aren't growing too fast or too slow. The goal is to stimulate the ovaries with injections for 10 to 12 days. Once my follicles reach a certain point, I'll add in additional medication to prevent my body from ovulating. Ovulation is the release of the egg, which is normally good, but in IVF, it's very bad. They cannot harvest an egg once it has been released.

Once the follicles get to a certain size, I'll take one last injection to prepare my body for ovulation. Why would we do this if we don't want to ovulate? It seems counter intuitive but the surge of LH hormone is what prepares the eggs, and helps them mature. At that point, I'll await my egg retrieval.

The egg retrieval is done under sedation, so I won't know how many eggs they gather until I wake up. The retrieval is done by withdrawing the fluid contents of each follicle (with the egg inside) into a needle. Once the eggs are retrieved, they are inspected by the embryologist and fertilized in the lab. We will find out our fertilization report (how many eggs fertilized) the following day.

At this point, it is all 100% out of our hands. The embryos will hopefully continue to grow (multiplication of cells) and we will decide in the next day or so on a day three or day five transfer. We will also hear the grade of our embryos and make the final decision on how many to transfer back. As I've stated before, the max is two for us, but we still haven't officially decided.

And that's it! Seems simple enough, right? I will return home after the transfer in a state we infertiles lovingly refer to as PUPO... Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise. I'll simply have to wait patiently (hahaha) for the first blood draw to see if an embryo attached and continued to grow!

Okay, so what can you pray for?

1. Wisdom for the doctors. IVF is pretty "standard" in that everyone goes through the basic steps above, but every woman is different, every woman responds differently to the medications, and no one really knows how a woman will respond until they start. So prayers that the doctors make wise decisions on protocols, medication levels, and the big things like when to trigger ovulation are all crucial! 
2. Courage for me. I've stated before that I am terrified of needles. I passed out over a finger prick in my teenage years! Things are better (a million blood draws will do that for you) but for some reason the injections don't seem the same as the blood draws in my mind. I'm lucky that I'm on a pretty low dose protocol when it comes to meds... I'll only need two injections a day. Regardless, I'm scared. And it looks like I'll have to inject myself for 2-3 doses. So yea, lots of courage for that.
3. Patience for Sam and my mom. When I'm not injecting myself, Sam and my mom will have this lovely task. And I'm a baby... I cry, I complain, I yell that he's not doing it right. Lots of patience needed by all.
4. Our babies. I've mentioned before, but as we can't say with 100% certainty when life begins or a soul takes root, we've decided to back the moment up as far as possible... we're considering the embryos our children the moment the sperm and egg meet. So lots of prayers for health for our babies would be amazing!
5. The Lord's will. We are obviously desperate for this to work. We're paying a lot of money, sure, but even more important is that we feel ready. We want a baby. And IVF is it... there are no bigger, better treatments to move on to after this. The only thing to do is to try IVF again. So we really, really, really want this to work... however, we want the Lord's will more. At least, we're trying really hard to want the Lord's will more. Which leads to:
6. Our hearts. IVF will either bring us to our highest high, or our lowest low to date. So prayers for acceptance for Sam and I are extremely important. I'll admit that I sometimes (often) want my way more than God's way, so prayers for my heart to align with the Lord are coveted. We fully accept and know that everything can go perfectly in terms of egg, sperm, uterine lining, etc, but if the Lord doesn't breathe life, we will not succeed. We also fully believe that everything can go terribly wrong, but that our God redeems. Prayers for our hearts to remember both of these things are crucial.

As I mentioned in the last post, the blog will be up and public throughout, so feel free to check in and read the updates. Our prayer requests will probably change as we move throughout the process.And that is it for now! Thank you all so much for agreeing to partner with us in prayer! There is truly no greater gift you can offer us in the days ahead!