growing things

Boy, time flies when you're stimming. That's weird lingo I just learned for folks who are medically stimulating their ovaries' follicles to produce many, many eggs for the purposes of scary needle harvesting, petri dish fertilizing, and cryofreezing for later use.
For the past week I have been giving myself shots every night, which is almost as unpleasant as it sounds. It's not so painful, but it takes me a number of big breaths to will my hand to poke a small hole in my own stomach and then flood said hole with stinging medication. That said, the worst of it is certainly my own nerves and it's all over pretty quickly. On the bright side, it makes me feel like a total badass to give myself not just one, but TWO shots every day.
The worst part of this process is that it necessitates an appointment at the fertility clinic every other day where they draw my blood and I have an ultrasound. Time spent in the office has yet to exceed 45minutes. The drive takes three hours and it's all timed so as to prevent me from being able to work.
The first day I went in for the ultrasound I was mighty proud of myself for thinking ahead. I have gotten pretty good at wearing things that doctors won't make me remove entirely. Seeing the surgeon? He's going to look at my chest and will make me wear a gown, but I can put my sweater over it if it opens in the front. Cold problem solved. Knowing we'd be trying to get a look at things that sit really low in my abdomen and that I'd be asked to at least partially undress so I could wear an outrageously over-sized hospital gown that -refusing my hard work and weird knots- would repeatedly slip open, I broke my own only fashion rule (wear real pants when leaving the house) and showed up in a pair of yoga pants. The soft, stretchy waistband designed to fold over seemed like the perfect solution to being allowed to keep wearing my clothes. A nurse led me to the exam room where a she handed me a sheet, "You'll need to undress from the waist down."
"But I wore these pants, see?" I said, proudly lifting the hem of my shirt so she could see just how very ultrasound-friendly a wardrobe selection I had made, "So I can just fold the top down and we're good, no interference with the pictures. It's always so cold in here."
"Uhh, miss? It's a vaginal ultrasound."
"..." 

So it goes. I still wear as many of my clothes as possible: knee-high socks, a sheet to hide from view the ultrasound and its probing, warm winter vest, thick sweater, scarf, and knit hat. I feel a little ridiculous wearing so many items of clothing while such a crucial one is missing; I feel vulnerable not doing so. It's interesting, if a little awkward, to study the images of my ovaries and their now-huge, black follicles, fluid-filled and plump with little eggs as the probe finds them. I ask a lot of questions. The configuration of four of the follicles looks remarkably like a skull, down to a small triangle where one usually finds two nostril openings (which didn't seem ominous until I typed that - good thing my superstition is only residual from a childhood of Catholicism and more enjoyable ghost stories). My ovaries are hormone-inflated giant versions of their usual selves. I can feel them, just a little.
Tonight I will switch up the medical routine, moving on up from follicle stimulants to a maturation trigger. Saturday morning we will head to the clinic for the last time until we're ready to give pregnancy a go and the doctors will get our gametes together to make sweet science on the 10th anniversary of the first time we decided to date each other. Romance.