@KJC7 I found planning life around having ivf a bit of a nightmare to be honest and I found it really stressful. Stress has no bearing on outcome, but it just makes the whole experience more unpleasant and I found the first cycle and the uncertainty which went with the whole process by far the most difficult of all of them.
Not sure if this is helpful, but I’ll give you a brief outline of how treatment and scans etc work. My treatment was a few years ago so things may have changed a bit, but I doubt they’ll have changed loads. I think I can remember it correctly, but things may have faded in my memory slightly with the passage of time and also with having had subsequent rounds of IVF.
On the long protocol..... start down reg injections on a Wednesday )after taking the contraceptive pill for a few weeks), down reg scan after a week on a weds AM. If everything is ok at this you start stims 2 days later (on the Friday). I wasn’t down regged enough and had to have another week of down regging (which totally threw all my timings with regards to treatment), but most people only need 7 days of down reg injections. Stims start on a Friday after the satisfactory down reg scan. After 5 days of you have a blood test (Wednesday AM), if this shows high oestrogen level, you have a scan 2 days later, if it doesn’t, you go for a scan the following Monday (5 days later). Once you start having scans on stims you go every other day until you’re ready for egg collection. Once you’re ready for egg collection, you have your trigger shot that evening (or I’m guessing if your scan was a Friday, the following evening) and egg collection 36 hours after the trigger.
St Helier only did scans on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when I was treated and they are always in the morning. The reason the whole thing was a nightmare is because you didn’t get an appointment time, so you had to queue. They started scanning at around 8.30. The doors to the clinic opened at 8 and when you arrived, you wrote your name on the white board and they’d scan you in order of arrival. What people did though in order to try and be at the front of the scanning queue was to arrive any time from about 7AM onwards and sit on the floor outside the clinic in a line so you could be at the front of the queue when the doors opened and you could put your details on the board. If you turned up at 8.30 there would usually be somewhere between 5 and 10 people in front of you.
Hopefully this will help you plan a bit, but you do only know when you are going to be scanned when you start the treatment and it all depends on how you respond. But they definitely only used to scan on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.
For egg collection you’ll need the whole day off work, but of course you won’t know when this is going to be until 2 days before it and it’s dependant on how you respond to the meds. They usually say people need to stim for 10-14 days but it can be longer or shorter. With me they kept moving the goalposts and saying they thought it would be after the next scan, then I’d have that and they say no, it’ll probably be after the next one which I found really frustrating and stressful.
Hope this is of some use. Happy to answer any further questions if you have them, although I may not respond as quickly as I’d like to!