Estrogen, estrogen, and what? Oh...MORE estrogen!

I had another monitoring appointment today and when the nurse performing the ultrasound told me that my uterine lining was 6.9, my first thought was that it wasn't quite thick enough. I know, I know......what MORE can I worry about?! I'll always find something!

The nurse from the fertility clinic called and told me that my uterine lining is a bit "thinner than what we want right now", so I'm going to increase my dose of estrogen AND start wearing estrogen patches. WOOOOO! That's a LOT of estrogen! Here I thought I was lucky for not feeling the typical side-effects that others feel. I also felt as though the intramuscular injections were too "easy" and too "painless", that we might not be getting it all the way in to the muscle. My blood work shows that my estrogen levels have definitely increased (from 42 to 417!), but my uterine lining isn't responding like it should. This has been a big concern for me all along as I've heard of surrogates who weren't able to proceed with a transfer due to the their body's lack of response to the meds. I've thought for a while "what if I don't respond to the meds and my lining doesn't thicken?". The nurse re-assured me that it IS in fact responding to the meds, but we're going to increase the dose and add some more estrogen to make sure we're at the point that we need it to be for the transfer. Everybody...........you've been warned!!! :)

A quick explanation for estrogen and why it is important for my uterine lining to thicken; estrogen helps thicken the lining (as does Progesterone, which I start pretty soon, too), which gives the embryos a nice "cushy landing spot" and increases our goal of achieving a pregnancy.