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Taking a Break

November 24, 2007

I can now add Thanksgiving to the list of holidays that AF has shown up on (Christmas '06, my birthday, Jeff's birthday, Mother's Day, and now Thanksgiving). So, I'm still not pregnant.

The good news is that between the Clomid, acupuncture, and the progesterone suppositories and cream, I managed to lengthen my luteal phase to 13 days. That was plenty of time for an embryo to implant! So I'm glad to know it can be done.

Things are really crazy at my clinic right now. My doctor was fired and the IVF center they partner with has taken over the whole operation. Apparently my doctor's success rates were not satisfactory to the clinic. This all happened very suddenly and out of the blue last week they just announced it to the staff.

None of them knew what was going on yesterday when I came in for my baseline blood work and ultrasound. I waited for 2 1/2 hours and finally the nurse manager in the ob-gyn department got me in for an ultrasound and told the lab what tests to run on my blood. After all that, it turns out the Clomid gave me a huge cyst on one of my ovaries, about 3cm big. When I saw it on the monitor, I asked the ultrasound tech, "That's my ovary, right??"

When I finally came home from the hospital, Jeff asked how my appointment went and I told him, "It couldn't have gone much worse. Dr. S was fired!" I told him the whole story of what a disaster the morning had been, and about the cyst. And we worked out how we want to proceed from here, making a new treatment plan for ourselves.

That afternoon, the nurse from the IVF center called me and explained that they recommended that we take a cycle off to give my body a chance to get back to normal and let the cyst resolve itself. I told her I understood, and that we want to meet with the new doctor so that we can proceed as quickly as possible towards in vitro fertilization. We believe that the IUIs won't work for us given our particular set of fertility issues.

The nurse was great and suggested that this month would be a great time to meet with the new doctor and to learn how to use injectable stimulants since that will be our next step whenever the cyst resolves itself. Our insurance company will pay for IVF only after we have tried three IUIs with injectables. So we knew we would have to do them, even though we don't believe they will work for us.

Given everything that happened yesterday, I can't believe how optimistic and happy we are both feeling about everything. I normally feel so hopeless and desperate whenever we have to take a month off, and I live in constant fear that our doctor would tell us we couldn't try during our next cycle for whatever reason.  We feel great that our new doctor is more open to the idea of more aggressive treatments than our old doctor was. We are so excited to have a plan to move forward as quickly as possible towards what we feel is the treatment that will work for us. Even though we aren't trying anything this month, and we know there are a few long months of IUIs with injectables, it's great to know there is an end in sight, and sometime in 2008, I could finally get pregnant with our first child!