In seven days I will begin my first round of fertility shots. Hooray! I never knew I would be this excited to experience menopause and ovarian-overload all in one month. Wait, menopause?

That’s how this process works. The first cycle of injections I’m about to begin will completely shut down my ovaries. To clarify, I have had a partial hysterectomy (removed my uterus but left my ovaries). So, I still have hormones naturally and the occasional “monthly” rollercoaster; however, I do not have a uterus therefore no periods. So, it is still necessary to take the Lupron (ovaries-off drug) in order to successfully overstimulate with the second cycle of drugs.

A couple of weeks after my first cycle of injections, I’ll start the next phase which will stimulate my ovaries to produce lots of eggs (imagine a chicken laying 4-5 times the amount of eggs they normally do). Sounds like fun! After a couple of weeks of these injections, I’ll  go in for some final blood work and ultrasounds, and then the grand finale of my work: the egg retrieval. They will harvest my eggs, as many as they can from both ovaries, and begin the fertilization process.

You have two choices when it comes to the fertilization: you can allow the eggs and sperm to self-fertilize (the “natural” method), or embryologists will singularly fertilize each viable egg. Our doctors have advised us to do half natural and half assisted fertilizations. The reasoning behind this is that A) We are technically not “infertile” other than me missing a mechanical part to my baby-oven and therefore we don’t really need someone to fertilize the eggs for us, and B) At this point in the game, we aren’t taking chances on anything not working properly and as long as we’ve come this far in the process, I feel a little hypocritical saying I demand to take the “natural” route anymore. So we decided to make everyone happy and let half of the little guys try on their own, and lend a helping hand to the other half. No pun intended.

The next month will either fly by, or drag on seemingly like a year. Either way, I’m finally starting to get excited. After everything we’ve been through, I don’t really know what to do with these feelings. A huge part of me doesn’t even want to get excited about anything before it happens, I suppose as a protection measure. I know it’s no way to live life, but it’s hard to be optimistic about the one thing that nearly destroyed my life.  I hope to look back on these blogs a few months from now with gratefulness, as I do now thinking back to January and February and how much progress I have made mentally since those dark months. I’m ready for the day not far from now when I can say again that we are expecting;  maybe it’s not in my own body, but we are the proud parents of those beautiful little miracles that will live in a petri dish for their first days of life, and then in a rented-oven for the next 9 months.

Bring on the needles, I’m ready to be a Mommy!