Meanwhile, as of Thursday we started a new series of shots. This is progesterone, which you can think of as "pregnancy hormone"; it's primary role is to initiate all of the changes that a woman's body goes through during pregnancy. Now, a couple of things about that:
1. You should remember that in the normal course of business, Sarah would be pregnant right now; the 8-cell embryo would be somewhere in her fallopian tube or uterus, and her body would be beginning to respond to this reality. Because our 8-cell emrbyo(s) happens to be in a neighboring state, we have to make some of these changes to Sarah's body by hand. Hence, the injections of progesterone.
2. Because of the special circumstances of conception, it's imperative that we maximize the chance of successful implantation and pregnancy. This means, among other things, that we want "overkill" on a number of pro-pregnancy measures. Again, this is a case for injecting larger-than-strictly-natural doses of progesterone into Sarah.
The shot is IM. It goes in the hip, just like the hCG shot. It uses the same 25G 1.5in needle I used for hCG. The bad news is, the hormone comes dissolved in some kind of oil. Have you ever had a nice, viscous IM tetanus shot? No fun, right? Now imagine getting one very night for a few weeks. Suck. But it's got to be done.
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