Friday, July 13, 2012

Holding Pattern

I haven't posted in awhile, so thought I'd give a little bit of an update.  We're in sort of a holding pattern at this point.

My saline ultrasound went well and I have no issues in my uterus.  I was really sort of expecting them to find something - a polyp or fibroid or too much of the heart shaped part, like I mentioned in a previous post.  So, when there was nothing there, I was both happy and a little discouraged.

We got Ian's strict morphology results back and it turns out things aren't 100% copacetic there.  The short version is that they want to see 14% of the sperm as "normal" (vs all those funny shaped ones I posted the other day) and Ian had about 8% normal.  We are actually both kind of excited about this, because it's a problem we can solve.  And not only is it a problem that we can solve, but it's a problem we can solve that doesn't involve more procedures for me.  YAY!  Anyhow, this is not necessarily what the whole issue has been.  Many men with percentages lower than this get many women pregnant all the time.  But it certainly is a likely factor in the difficulties we've had.

So, this means IVF with ICSI is likely the plan.  The IVF cycle is about 2 months long with all the medications leading up to it.  We have decided to hold off on starting the first cycle until we figure out how we're going to pay for it.  In the meantime, we're doing everything we can to get ready, including both of the tests I mentioned above.  We went to an IVF Orientation and I've had some more tests done (genetic tests as well as infectious disease stuff).   So, while I'm off the medication, I am still battered and bruised in the blood drawing area of my arms.

Once we've made a decision, I'll let my nurse know that we are ready to proceed and at that point we'll have another appointment with the doctor to determine our exact course of treatment, they'll put together a calender for me, and we'll start on the first medication (which is actually hormonal birth control).   This is a good sample of what an IVF two-month calendar might look like. 

I don't want to talk too much about the financial things we are looking at until a decision has been made.  But I do think it's an important aspect of this process and I will, once we've made the decision, post about what our options were and how we decided.   And to the people (you know who you are) who went out of your way to try to help us figure this out, to provide us options, and to care enough to spend time and mental energy on this, I can't express how much that means to me.