Trigger Defined

Mom asked me what a "trigger" was, so I thought others who don't get to experience this wonderful world of infertility might want to know too.

In short, a trigger is an injection that gets the eggs ready for harvesting - puts them through final maturation. It's that "ready to go" shot before any kind of assisted reproductive technology procedure.

My clinic just switched from sub-cutaneous trigger shots (those are the ones I can do in my stomach - just into pinched skin), to intra-muscular (IM) trigger shots (the ones Michael has to give me in the butt muscle). They said that they see higher rates of mature eggs when they use the IM trigger shots. So, hey - I'm all for that. Last time, they got 8 eggs from me, but only 6 were mature. We'll see how we do this go round.

So last night was my first IM trigger shot ever. They give you a time to do the shot based on the schedule for the operating room on the day of your egg retrieval (trigger must be 36 hours earlier). My time slot is 2 PM on Friday, which means my trigger shot was this morning at 2 AM. Needless to say, neither of us slept very well. I didn't sleep before the shot, because I was worried about waking up and ... well, the shot. Then afterwards, I was pretty keyed up. I slept in today and came to work around noon.

I had a minor freak out last night as I was reading the instructions for the IM trigger shot. (Since we'd never done it before, I wanted to be prepared and not just trying to figure it out when we were half asleep). I had 2 sets of instructions that did not match and needles that did not match either set of instructions. Michael noticed I started talking really fast and then I got on the computer and started posting like a madwoman to my fellow infertiles to see if they knew what to do. Michael was great. He found the number for my clinic and wrote down the emergency number on their answering service. He totally calmed me down and the doctor and the on-call pharmacist both called me back immediately and set me straight about which needles to use. Thank goodness for my rational, level-headed, non-hormone-filled husband (in addition to folks who agree to be on-call for nuts like me!).

Tomorrow is the egg retrieval (2 PM). I can't eat or drink anything before that, so I should be a joy to be around. Michael said something about just dropping me off... I hope he was kidding. ;-)