She blew, blew, blew my vein!

We made it into the big bad city WAY before the crack of dawn this morning, although there was an astonishing amount of traffic already. So we parked the car at the insanely expensive garage and ambled on up to the IVF center. After filling out tons of forms and enduring a rather strange group pre-op meeting with the nurse, it was off to the most grueling part of the daily proceedings for me: the dreaded blood draw.

I should have known it, but I was too tired to insist on getting one of my two magic blood women who can draw blood even from a stone. So I stupidly, stooooooooooooopidly let overconfident nurse E poke my poor veins. The result? She blew it big time. I mean BIG time! Or more precisely, due to her inept stabbing, my vein blew up big time. Lucky me, this happened on the day where they needed to draw a large amount of blood out of me in a syringe, meaning they couldn't use any hand veins. Magic blood woman R, who was ultimately called to the rescue, tried to get blood out of that same vein, but a huge clot had already formed and stilled the initial flow of blood. And it hurt like crazy.

So they sent me off to ultrasound, and ordered me back for the blood draw after I had heated my arm with little handwarmers. The good news is that my follies are apparently looking quite excellent, i.e. large and juicy. The doctor thought they may get as many as eight eggs out of me, which should result in a relatively decent number of embies, with a bit of luck.

The bad news is that even magic blood woman could not find a vein in my right arm that would yield sufficient blood for this plasma blood-letting. So I let her dig into my technically off-limits left arm, as it is relatively unscathed by needles. She found a great vein there and got the remaining blood she needed. Nonetheless, between the first failed attempt on the right by nurse E and later rescue attempts, my right arm is now black and blue with a juicy hematoma and a nicely developing thrombophlebitis. Yikes, it is really painful -- despite the warm compresses that I have been lavishing upon it. 

The bruise is so bad, and my vein where they had previously found blood still so tender to the touch that I fear the right arm is totally shot now, including the carefully saved vein. So I wonder where they will put in the IV line for tomorrow... But they have to get those eggos out of me tomorrow morning, or else I will ovulate and everything will have been for naught. So let's all hope for the best...

I've gotta keep reminding myself, it's all for a good purpose. It's all for a good purpose. It's all for a better future...!!!

Boy am I glad I opted to have a mediport implanted! If my veins had blown like that with the chemo going into my body, I might have suffered severe nerve and muscle damage. So it will be extra important for me to have the protective effects of that catheter that leads the chemo drugs close to my heart so they can get pumped around more efficiently.

So I'm resting now, reading, lounging, trying to forget the morning's pain. We've been scheduled for 6:45 a.m. arrival at the hospital's IVF suite. This means another pre-dawn trip into the big bad. I'm drinking electrolyte drinks now in an attempt to super-hydrate to make IV line insertion easier tomorrow. I'll also make sure to eat well, before I start my pre-op fast at midnight. Hopefully, this will make the nurses' job easier tomorrow, and spare me additional pain.

Depending on how things go, I may not feel up to posting tomorrow. On Thursday, we'll find out how many eggos they got, and how many of those could be persuaded to transform into little pre-embies. I'll definitely post after we find out.