ivf - day 21

This is the handful of pills I take every morning, and have taken for the past 3 months.

My last cycle of IVF, I only took one prenatal vitamin plus 800mcg of folate. This time, I did some research and found some vitamins that might be good for me to take to help with egg quality. Egg quality is the number one issue with IVF. You can harvest LOTS of eggs (sometimes up to 40-60) but if the quality is bad, your chance of success is low.

Even though my egg quality in the last cycle wasn't technically an issue, this time, I wanted to be more prepared and try to boost it. To be honest, the biggest factor in quality is age (which thankfully I have on my side), but I figured taking some extra vitamins wouldn't hurt either.

So, here's the list of why I'm taking what I'm taking:

• DHEA - 75mg - some research suggests this helps with egg quality. It's mostly found in men's vitamins...not sure why, but you can buy it separately. I take 2 pills for this: a 50mg and 25mg.
• Vitamin E - increased blood flow, natural blood thinner. It's imperative to have blood flow to the uterus for a good outcome, and again, even though this wasn't necessarily a problem in my last cycle, I thought it couldn't hurt.
• Vitamin C - good for overall health and for some fertility reason I can't remember. I wouldn't know it was good for overall health at this moment, though because I'm hacking my head off and running a fever. But, it kept me healthy through CHA, so that was nice. Oh, and I've since switched to a chewable for that one because it's a whopper of a pill at 1000mg and doesn't have a good coating on it, so I was tired of forcing it down. (read: "gagging it down")
• Selenium - good egg quality
• Zinc - good egg quality
• Birth Control - seems odd to take if you're trying to conceive, right? But, the purpose is for the doctors to control the cycle and to suppress during the first month. It's doing the job and I only have 2 more days to take that one.
  
• Folate - I'm going to write in further detail about folate, but for now, let me say it's the best supplement in the world. It's great for uterine blood flow and preventing birth defects and therefore egg quality as well.
• Prenate DHA - I used to sell this vitamin and it's the #1 brand in the country for a reason. I think it has about 12 vitamins one of which is folate and another important one is DHA, which I'll talk more about later.

So, that's my morning regimen followed by one more folate in the evening. Fun stuff.