Ova-achiever

As I watched my oldest coloring his first eggs for Easter, laying the finished ones on a plate, each ova with his or his brothers' name on it, I found myself having a different perspective on what eggs symbolized to me. With three eggs, one for each child, I was reminded of the many, many eggs I had produced for these guys to be here. As I'm sure I've mentioned in the past, my babies were all made possible by in vitro fertilization (IVF).

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure to find out all the sorted details related to IVF, let me quickly explain that the woman is given tons of hormones to increase egg production (rather they cause many eggs to mature since we don't actually produce new ones - we're born with them all). We normally mature one egg per cycle but in IVF you either produce a few, several or many. When they first give you hormones, they make an educated guess as to how much you need in order to make a good amount of eggs (or follicles as they call them). Until they have had a chance to observe their effects on you, you feel a bit like an infertile guinea pig.

My nickname became the ova-achiever (coined by myself, thank you very much, but used by all - husband, physicians, nurses. . . .) I was unusual. Instead of producing 8-10, for example, I produced about 60 - in each ovary. Think about that: a normal ovary matures one per cycle and I had 60. As you can imagine this did affect me a bit. My ovaries literally became the size of grapefruit.

Ouch.

Rather than bore you further with all the medical details, let's just say that I had a lot of eggs. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, we only had a limited number of embryos produced from this due to other fertility issues we had. Over the course of the next few years, we went through four rounds of IVF, producing 3 pregnancies, two of which resulted in my little dudes. It was quite an ordeal that I'm eager to forget. (Obviously, not the good pregnancies or my children.)

Back when I was going through IVF and swollen with eggs, the idea of the little buggers was so completely unappealing. I felt like a chicken who would be disgusted by the thought of eating her own eggs. Yuck! So, as I looked at the three little eggs, each with my sons names on them, I decided that eggs aren't so bad after all and I quite love the little rascals.