It's been a month since I have updated and I'm not happy about that. I really want to document every step of the way. So this may be long.
Thursday, October 4th, I had a test called a Saline Infusion Sonogram (SIS) and a trial transfer. I had my doctor, a student, a doc who runs an IVF clinic in India who was visiting and learning how IVFs are done in the US and a nurse. It was a crowded room, with a warm spot light on my goods with 4 sets of eyes on the prize. AWKWARD! And to top it all off, everything was done twice so that the doc could show the student what to do and then the student would give it a whirl.
The trial transfer is where they insert a catheter into my uterus to see where they would transfer our future embryos. That went well. The SIS didn't go as planned. The SIS is where they insert fluid into your uterus and do an ultra sound to look for uterine abnormalities that could make it difficult for an embryo to stick. Well, they found something. Polyps. I was speechless. I had no symptoms of having anything wrong. I thought I would walk in and walk out passing all tests like it was just something I had to do to cross off the list (literally). Doc told me that he wants to get me into surgery right away to get them removed. Like the next day! Everything happened so fast, I left there feeling sick to my stomach. I called John and cried. I felt if it's not one thing, it's another to prevent us from moving forward.
Fast forward to the next day Friday, Oct 5th I was to arrive at about 11:00 for a 1:00 surgery....H.U.N.G.R.Y. I hadn't eaten or drank anything since about 9 the night before. They prepped me, knocked me out and the next thing I know, I'm waking up in recovery. Doc told John that they removed 2 polyps. They cut me a little with the camera so they had to give me a stitch. Not exactly where though. I had some bleeding for several days and was crampy on and off but was doing pretty well by Sunday night.
The week prior, John had seen his Urologist to provide a sample for an updated SA. We got the results right around the same time I had surgery. That was another blow. The results showed that there were NO moving sperm. NONE! ZERO! ZILCH! WTF?! How can this be? He had surgery last December to repair what they believe was the problem only to watch his SAs decrease every month. The Urologist told him to stop Clomid all together. He had been taken Clomid for 2 years to help increase his testosterone levels which in turn would help improve the quality of his sperm. Well they think it's burning him out.
We had an appt with our IVF doc Tuesday after my surgery to sign consent forms for the IVF. We took his SA results with us to see if the doc feels he can still do IVF with his sperm. Doc said that this was a problem, but wanted for him to provide a sample at his clinic so that he can use his own lab to determine whats useable for IVF or not. A week later, John was able to provide a sample and the doc said that although it was very low, there is enough to proceed with IVF. That was the best news ever! I immediately called the nurse there to ask the next steps. She told me to continue taking the birth control and take my last pill on the 23rd (tomorrow) and come in the morning on the 24th to get checked out to make sure everything is good to go with my system and to learn how to administer some of the meds. I would then start meds on Saturday the 27th. I was so excited to have actual dates. It made me feel like this was really happening. A plan...that's what I had been waiting for.
I will be taking meds for about 7-10 days depending on how well I respond to the meds. So I am guessing the first full week of November is when they will retrieve the eggs.
Consent signing was very interesting. I think I signed my name more than I signed for our mortgage. Basically we had to go over all case scenarios. Things such as, if we have frozen embryos and one of us dies, what does the living spouse have permission to do with them. Or in case of a divorce, what do we want to do with the embryos. If we have eggs that are too immature or too defected to use what do we want to do with them. If we don't pay on the frozen embryo storage, what does the facility have permission to do with them. Mainly the options were to either discard or let them use them for training. If there were any relative studies going on we could have opted for that but there were none. We chose to use for training in most scenarios except if the embryos are at the storage facility and we both die we had the option to donate our embryos to other couples and I honestly cannot bring myself to allow that so we chose to discard them. I can't imagine little products of John and I running around this earth that we don't know or our family don't know.
Just celebrated my 31st birthday yesterday. All I could think of was I was 27 years old when we first started trying to get pregnant. Just one month shy of being 28. Here I am 31 and still struggling. Crazy to think where these 3 years have taken us. I hope to have a baby before I'm 32. I would be the happiest girl in the world! As always, we will take all the love, support, thoughts and prayers we can get. We love you all and really appreciate you all allowing us to share our story so openly.
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