If you’ve been following my blog, you might know that my husband and I have been going through IVF to have a baby. It has been a crazy journey and if you’re interested in reading more about it, you can check out this in-depth post.

We have learned through this experience, that it can be different for everyone and that there are some symptoms or experiences that the nurses and doctor’s don’t explicitly warn you about ahead of time.

I’m not entirely sure why they don’t tell you all the possibilities of what you can expect, but my theory is that they either don’t want to scare you or they don’t want you to have psychosomatic symptoms and prepare for something that may or may not happen.

Either way, there have been so many times that I would start to panic about something and then just ask my doctor or nurse the next time I saw them, only for them to tell me “yes, that’s normal”. This always left me thinking, then why didn’t you tell me this was possible?!

One example of this was when I would ask the nurse how I could expect to feel on a particular medicine. Was there anything I should look out for or be concerned about? She would always tell me “most people don’t even notice they’re on it”. So of course I would prepare to not feel that different, but little did I know that I would have a few weird symptoms or uncomfortable feelings that I would later find out are “normal” and could have saved me some worry if I knew it was normal ahead of time.

So I’m here to share some of those feelings or experiences with you.

Expect the Unexpected

1. This is a long process.
2. It is never guaranteed that you’ll move on to the next phase.
3. The stomach shots hurt. Every time.
4. You will be mega bloated.
5. When preparing for egg retrieval, you’ll likely feel dizzy and you’ll need an over abundance of fluids.
6. It is likely going to hurt after your egg retrieval, or at the very least you will be ridiculously bloated and uncomfortable. You can read more about that here.
7. I was told that the preparation for the egg retrieval was the hard part, but I completely disagree.
8. Preparing for embryo transfer requires more painful shots, stomach shots, and butt shots. You can read about preparing for that here.
9. The butt shots hurt. Every time.
10. You will be irritable, tired, bloated, and slightly nauseous – way before getting a positive test result, and it might not be positive.
11. The actual embryo transfer hurts internally a little bit, but that doesn’t last that long.
12. You might have some outer thigh numbness or butt cheek numbness from the progesterone shots.
13. It will ALL be worth it.

This is not as easy as it may seem to go through this process and there are good days and bad days. The most important thing to remember is why you’re doing this, what it would mean for you and your family. You can do it, you are strong, you got this!