Sorry, sorry, I’ve been rubbish – it’s nearly a week since my last post. My excuse? Umm, well, I can’t lie; as soon as I was able to drink alcohol again, I was going out and drinking and seeing people. Which obviously meant less time sitting at home on my own and thus fewer – ok, no – posts.

But I’m back, feeling guilty. And also realising that I’ve rather shied away from some of the less sanitised aspects of egg freezing. Which is crap of me, because this blog was meant to be “everything you wanted to know but never dared ask…” so that’s this post. The gory details. Readers of a sensitive disposition might want to skip it. It includes words like “discharge” and “bleeding”.

So, after my last egg collection, although I’d been warned that I might get some “spotting”, I actually didn’t bleed at all (which is weird when you consider that they’ve stuck a needle into your ovaries, several times) and got my period bang on the day I’d have expected it if I hadn’t been messing around with a shedload of hormones.

This time, I was told that the doctor “had to use some pressure” (what can I say? I’m a tough old bird) and so I wasn’t surprised when I did get a bit of bleeding both that day and the next day.

But then it didn’t stop. I got a sort of brown discharge on about the third day – and you think, “hm, ok, that’s probably my body just cleaning out the last of it” but it wasn’t. And I had these dull sort of period-style pains that you assume are your body just reacclimatising or something – but occasionally fear might be that your entire pelvic area is infected, or something dramatic like that.

I kept ignoring it but then by Thursday when I was seeing what looked like fresh blood, I did start to worry slightly. That said, I also knew that the trigger shot I’d taken this time – Buserelin – was different from the Ovitrelle that I took last time, and I wondered if that might have brought on an early period. Anyway, I called my clinic – who were pretty crap for various reasons, but more on that in another post – and they confirmed that yes Buserelin can cause a very early period – or withdrawal bleed as they call it – as it “shuts everything down” and that period can be heavier than usual and last for longer than usual. Basically, my doctor didn’t seem to be concerned that I was haemorrhaging to death through punctured ovaries so I decided to chill the fuck out about it.

But it did make me realise – again – that googling this shit doesn’t help. Because google Buserelin and you come across all these women using it for weeks on end to shut down their ovaries entirely before using Gonal-F to stimulate them again. Or something like that. One of these days I’ll actually sit down and work out what all these drugs do and how they do them, until then, I guess I’ll just bumble along, injecting myself with needles of whatever they give me, marvelling at the fact that they let a complete fuckwit like me lose with syringes full of potentially harmful hormones, and assuming that they know what they’re doing and that the answer to “is this normal? Am I going to die?” is pretty much always “Yes” and “Yes, eventually, but probably not from this.”