Our appointment was almost 2 hours long. Most of it was spent in Dr. Max's office, going over our charts and lab results and discussing statistics and terminology. I've never met a man that has more statistics in his head than Dr. Max. I guess it's a good thing, though, because he knows his stuff and he knows what the benefits are for us to do certain things vs. other things that may not have as high of a success rate. Grouper, being an engineer, really loves the way that Dr. Max presents everything because it's totally a numbers game. Anyway, he started off right away with a number that I didn't particularly like. He said that with the way Grouper's sperm is and considering that my FSH levels from my blood work last month was 10.6, (it should be 10 or below, apparently) that we only have a 2% chance of conceiving naturally within one year. Ugh. He said that he was quite surprised that we were able to conceive on our own the first time, especially after just five months of trying, but that it was a really good thing that we did, because now there are things that he knows about my body that he couldn't thoroughly test for: the fact that eggs can move through my fallopian tube and implant. He also said that he wasn't surprised that my pregnancy ended in miscarriage because in all likelihood, the sperm that fertilized my egg was a poorly shaped one, and therefore it was chromosomally (I don't know if I spelled that correctly) defective. Pregnancies that begin with a poorly shaped sperm have over 50% miscarriage rate before 8 weeks. As we were sitting there, all of these light bulbs kept going off in my head. It all kinda adds up and makes sense now. It still totally effing sucks, but it makes sense.
He told us that our chances of conceiving will be greatly increased with an IUI or IVF. He said that if I was over 35 (I'm almost 27), he would say that we need to go straight to IVF, but since I'm not and since my cycles aren't all that bad, we may have a shot with IUI. He said we can try it for a few months unmedicated, and if nothing happens, then we step it up to either medicated IUI (with Clo.mid and hcG shots) or IVF after that. He also said that if sperm counts are high and everything with that route is going well, he sometimes does two IUIs per cycle, which I didn't even know was possible. He said that when sperm is washed, though, they don't test that sperm's morphology, so we have no real way of knowing if it's good or not, but the fact that all of it goes straight into my fallopian tubes and doesn't have to make the entire journey definitely increases our odds. He said that IVF cycles usually run about $9300 for the initial one with egg retrieval and everything, and every thaw cycle is an additional $1500-2000. Ugh.
So we had all the info, and he told us to go home and think about it, and then he said, "Wait, I forgot to ask you where you are in this cycle. What cycle day are you on?" I told him yesterday was day 16 and that I've been ovulating on day 17 the past couple cycles. So he said, "Well, since you're here, let's go check your follicles and see if they've ruptured and how they look, and if they look good, you can have an IUI tomorrow." My mouth hit the floor. This guy wasn't messing around! And I hadn't even shaved my legs! :) We went in and looked, and I had 2 follies on one side, one was completely undeveloped and the other one was only about 7.5mm, and the other one on the other side was 8mm....so they were both too small to work with. He said that now that he's seen that my follies are small, he recommends that we do a medicated IUI right out of the gate. So, starting with my next cycle, I start Clo.mid and I'll have an hcG shot. He said we have something like a 28% chance of conceiving. I'm ok with that, it's a hell of a lot higher than 2%.
This is really happening, I'm still having trouble wrapping my brain around that. I still want to believe that we can do this on our own, but it's obvious we can't. When I saw the fact that our consult was labeled "high severity" on our bill, it really hit home. Hopefully they can help us soon.........
