On my twitter feed today – I’m there as @EggedOnBlog, so do come and say hello – I saw a post from @RedMagDaily flagging an interview with author Samantha Shannon that said ‘Write the story you want to write.’ Me being me, I read it too quickly and thought it said ‘Write the story you want to read’ which I thought sounded like a good maxim (and, actually is possibly the same as writing the story you want to write.)

Because that’s what this blog was meant to be about. I wanted to write the story that I wish had been out there when I was thinking about freezing my eggs. And I’m not always sure I’ve done that terribly well. I wanted this blog to be about all the aspects of it – the practical stuff, the emotional stuff, the funny stuff, the soul-searching stuff – but I don’t know if one blog can really do all that. I also worry that because I didn’t start blogging until after I’d already done one cycle of it all, that I’ve forgotten how little I knew when I first embarked upon this; how the terms AMH and Gonal-f meant nothing to me; that I’ve taken the second cycle so much in my stride that anyone reading this in the throes of misery, self-doubt and angst that their first cycle might be generating, might not realise that I felt like that too, and that I think that’s a totally normal response. So, I promise more misery posts in the future. Or at least more posts that attempt to address ignorance and that first cycle.

Today though I’m going to talk a bit more about the actual collection procedure. They do it the same way that they do the scans, they put an ultrasound probe (which looks like a dildo) inside you, with a needle attached to it, syringe out the fluid in each of the follicles and, hopefully, in the fluid, find an egg. Not all follicles contain eggs, not all eggs are of a good enough quality to freeze.

Then – at my clinic anyway – they also give you pain killers through the cannula (oh, and an antibiotic in the form of an anal suppository too) but all this happens while you’re sedated so you know nothing about it. Afterwards, they keep you in for about an hour, give you tea and biscuits, check you feel OK, can walk and have been to the loo before letting you go. They insist on someone else picking you up if you go in on your own, or you have to sign something to say that it’s not their fault if you walk into the middle of the road in a post-propofol daze and get hit by a bus.

In terms of pain, you just have a bit of dull period-style pain for the rest of the day, feel a bit whacked and maybe have a bit of spotting. Depending on how the procedure went, they may give you follow-up antibiotics. This time they only gave me amoxicillin – mostly because I BEGGED them not to give me flagyl, the one that you can’t drink with.

I am going to feel like such a fucking moron if I end up with a bacterial infection purely because I didn’t want to stay off the booze for another five days.