Results

So my ultrasound came back the other day with less than great news: I have a polyp on my gallbladder that will need surgery. I have to go into the surgeon soon to discuss it. The only problem is we still have only one car (and Bill works different hours ever day while he's technically on first shift, but in two weeks he'll be on second and then third for a few weeks and then back to first. How do you plan doctor appointments around that??) and I may not have insurance for the next month or so. I have no idea how 1) to get to the surgeon, 2) how to have surgery when Bill has zero days to take off, 3) how to balance kids and my own post-op care after. It's quite stressful and I'm trying to figure it out as we go. Currently, I'm waiting for the appointment to get booked and then I'll go from there.

Meanwhile, I'm fighting back. I started doing my cancer fighting, super healthy smoothies again. They taste TERRIBLE but they're great for many things, including purifying blood and cleaning out the liver - which is a good thing for my gallbladder. My hope is that it might even help the polyp and, at the very least, it'll keep it from getting any worse.

I also rented the book It Starts With The Egg, which is all about how to get on the perfect diet to improve egg quality and IVF success rates. Pretty much everyone I know doing IVF has read this book and it has very positive reviews from those I know who got pregnant in their IVF cycles after following it. Working on a good diet to improve my body will make me feel like all these months waiting are worth something. It'll help me not rush through or feel like I'm stuck. Every day will make me better and closer to where I need to be.

Small, baby steps. Hopefully this is the last step that is scary so I can look forward to a healthy, awesome body that is fully ready to tackle the IVF challenge.

Blood panels and Ultrasounds

I've been having a few issues lately (pain under my right rib cage for a few months in different places) so I finally decided to get it all checked out before switching insurances at the start of the new month.

My doctor ran a two full blood panels to check everything from thyroid to liver. With the craziness of my weight in the last decade (not being able to gain weight until I went on birth control) I have wanted to get my thyroid checked for a while. Moreso lately because I've heard it can have a big effect on IVF statistics. I was very happy and relieved to see that my thyroid tests came back in the normal range. Hooray! My liver did too.

I'm certainly interested to see if I have gallbladder issues, because I've recently read that IVF can make that worse with the surge of estrogen.

I'm hoping the issue is muscular, but I've never had muscle pulls last for so long.

I should know my ultrasound results by Monday. So far, all my tests came back clear so I'm praying my ultrasounds do too.

The only thing that came back negatively is my Vitamin D count. My doctor prescribed some heavy dosage of that and to recount in 12 weeks. This is something I'm totally okay with as Vitamin D was something my RE says I should be on in preparation for IVF.

I'm counting all this as baby steps towards IVF. Knowing more about the health of my body, which can impact the success rates of the process, is definitely helpful and makes me a bit more confident.

Hoping that whatever is currently going on with me is nothing that will get in the way of our current plans and is something that will be resolved very soon!

First Consultation

We saw a RE for our first consultation today. In the last few days, I've found a high contender to possibly go with that's not this place, so for right now we're making notes and figuring out what fits us best.

We found out that the price for us to do the IVF procedure is where we were thinking it would be.  Without diagnosis and meds (which our insurance will be covering) it'll be about $7,500. We technically have that now, since we cashed out a fund from Bill's old job but we don't want to only use that. We've decided that we'll try next spring, so probably exactly a year or so from now.

An exciting thing we found out today was at this practice, there's a devout Catholic as one of the IVF doctors. He doesn't do certain things (like egg freezing, PGS testing, etc) but he does all the rest. I'm very eager to meet with him and find out the specifics of how he stays in line with Catholicism through his job. Whether we go with him or not, we'd like to do this as much in line with our religious beliefs as possible and find out what we can and can not do in the eyes of the church.

We're trying to figure out if we want to do PGS testing, which is rating the embryos to see which one has the best shot of surviving and thriving. It's an extra almost 3k, but we only want to pay the $7,500 once. It might be worth paying a bit extra if it means 80% success rate instead of only 35%. But it also depends on how many eggs they retrieve. If only 2-3 make it through, it wouldn't be worth it to do PGS.

We're also debating if we want to fertilize only two eggs at a time so we won't have extra embryos left, or fertilize all at once and see what makes it through and freeze whatever we don't use, as it shouldn't be many.

We're going to see if we like the other place any better and see what their prices are and then decide where to go. This consultation gave me a lot of hope. We can handle the price of one cycle, my cysts shouldn't pose too much of an issue and all the labs will be covered.

I'm going to start back up on folic acid and extra vitamin d, as the RE said that should help get my body ready for now.

I'll be calling tomorrow the other option to see how soon I can get an appointment. Once we get our new insurance, I'll be calling the Catholic RE to have a discussion with him. Then we'll prep the best we can on our own with diet changes and vitamins as we save up money and wait for next spring.

Monday

I got an IVF consultation appointment for Monday with the RE that I wanted to talk to! I'm quite excited to be getting to make this step and find out all of the details that we'll need. I've been waiting just for this appointment for 15 months. Even if the answers reveal a set back, at least we'll be getting this part done and we'll have the knowledge we need to plan our next steps and secure a date in our plans.

I've spent two days researching. If I don't like this RE's way of doing things (from their stats, it seems like they mostly do only one egg and mostly fresh transfers) I have a very solid back up at the other hospital that seems much more popular and lenient as far as allowing the patient to have a hand in decisions.

I made a full page list of questions I plan to ask and am nervously excited to find out some real information on how ivf works in our area. Having a back up makes me feel better about my options as well. I'm already researching a back up REs and which one I'd go with next just so I can be fully informed of my options.

We got a babysitter for the kids so we can go and make sure we're not being insensitive (the office FINALLY just separated infertility patients from pregnancy patients two months ago) and so we can have our full attention directed at this.

Now all there is to do is wait until Monday and pray pray pray.

Questions for Our RE

We've been talking a lot about finances lately since so much is changing with the new job. We' sat down, added things up, and think that as long as everything goes smoothly with getting this job this month, we should be able to start trying IVF as early as January 2018. 

This means we're going to try to get a consult with the infertility doctor that also did my surgery last year. He knows my case and said I was a good candidate. We have a million questions we need answered so we can officially start a target date.  Such as:

That doctor told us that diagnostics were roughly half of the $15,000 cost of IVF per cycle. He said we obviously don't need any diagnostics since our problem is clear, which means he should be able to give us a quote of what is needed and hopefully, it'll be much, much less than 15k. Then we'll have to figure out how much the meds alone are so we can subtract that from the total, as our new insurance covers infertility meds. I'm hoping this means that each cycle of IVF will only be 5-8k instead of 15k. Big difference! Plus, anything over $5,500  (this includes travel expenses, hotel stays if needed, and all IVF related items) can be written off on taxes and gotten back.

Another question we have is how expensive is it to just do a FET transfer if we do end up with a fertilized egg or two left over. That would be no diagnostic, no two week meds, no surgery, just the implantation. 

I want to find out what my meds would be like as well. I only have one ovary to stimulate instead of two, so do I get a lower dosage? Seeing what the meds do to women, I'd love if that were the case. 

I need to know the exact plan he would have for my case as well. I know a lot of IVF women have a month of meds to stop a cycle, then do a hyper cycle, then remove the eggs and confuse the body and then, if they get pregnant, have to do progesterone pills until 15 weeks. I don't know if my case would be different or not. 

I also need to know if he'd be willing to do a two egg implant. We only can do up to two cycles, depending on the total cost. We'd like to take the chance of two eggs to raise our chances and we're fine if it would happen to result in twins. But some RE doctors only do one egg for under 34 year old women. 

It's exciting and comforting to finally be so close to IVF and to have a date in mind. I can't figure out when I'd want to do it more. My original rule was I wanted to not be pregnant in January at all, because I have such a bad track record with January. However, that means I can only get pregnant in February and March. But I don't want to do March because that would be another December baby, and one December birthday next to Christmas is enough. A February baby would be October/November, which means another winter baby, which is rough. I want a Spring baby, but that means pushing IVF off until half of 2018 is over and I don't know if I want to do that. So the month aspect is something I haven't figured out yet. 

It's also strangely comforting to know that where we capped it at. We agreed to try two cycles. If it doesn't happen in two cycles, then we let it go and move on. Two cycles mean we gave it a good shot and put all we could into it. I think if we didn't cap it now, it would be stressful and upsetting later. There's a peace about knowing when we'll do it and how long we'll try for. 

So that's where we're at now. We have goals, we have a consultation I'll be setting up this coming week, and we have our set limitations. Last year I was so depressed, not knowing any of these things and feeling like we'd never be able to try. Things are going so different last year.

News

A renewed hope of IVF is slowly growing.

Bill got a new job. It's not at an IVF-friendly place (though it was close, as the insurance is based in Illinois, a mandated state, and will cover IVF if the company chooses it. Ours did not.) However, it does cover infertility medications as well as diagnostics, which means we should be able to get our IVF consult for a price estimate and our few thousand dollar meds covered.  While it's not a big step, it is one closer to what we have been at (his job he's been at covered nothing but diagnostic)

Besides the insurance, Bill will now be earning nearly $10,000 more than what he made last year working 6 days a week. The $10,000 doesn't include the overtime he'll be getting, it's just straight salary, so he should earn more than that while only working 5 days a week.

He'll also be out of the dangerous chemicals that are in his previous job and could hurt fertility with long exposure. Now he'll be in a food friendly place and as a supervisor, so he won't be doing such strenuous work either.

So this new job means better IVF med insurance + more money to save for IVF + better work conditions.

We're going to see how much we can put away to see if we can afford IVF. We're also going to be making a consult, probably in the next month, to get a real estimate. Our estimated IVF procedure is different than most. Our doctor said a large sum of the regular cost (around 15,000) is diagnostic and meds. With meds covered and my diagnosis already well known, those won't factor into the money we have to pay.

We're also considering Bill taking a semester off of school once he finishes next semester (he'll be switching majors, so he'd only be skipping one semester while he figures out which of the work related/paid for schooling he'd like to venture into next) and one of us going to work at the new Starbucks that'll be only a few miles from us. They cover 80% of IVF, so it's probably our quickest option. They only do up to, I believe, 3 cycles, so one of us would only have to work 3 months there at part time.

All of this makes it seem like IVF may be possible for us in the next year or two. It's a really exciting prospect. This is the closest we've ever been to achieving our goal. There's finally substantial hope for us to try having another baby.

Month Late Resolution

It may be February, but I have a new resolution. One I couldn't start in January because it was too impossible. But now...

2017 will be a year full of joy and free of anxiety.

I'm always afraid of January. And the first week of February had a doctor appointment to determine if my ovary was trying to kill itself and possibly need exploratory surgery. I was so scared I was having panic attacks and sobbing. But January went over smoothly and the doctor appointment revealed that while I'm still getting cysts and they're rupturing, they're only half the size and the pain is manageable. The birth control is working.

I need a relief from the constant worry and debilitating fear that's taken over my life for the last year. I need calm and joy, so that's what I'm going to choose to seek out. I have the assurance of my ultrasound yesterday and my doctor that says my reproductive parts, the parts I worry most about, are totally fine. I'm going to take that and run with it.

I'm going to fill my head with thoughts of spring and sunshine and warmth. I'm going to eagerly watch as flowers bloom and warm walks begin and we can get out our bikes. I'm going to start working out and reclaim the body I miss. I'm going to write without care and edit ruthlessly until I can feel confident again and start sending out submissions. I'm going to find a way to find confidence to go on business meetings and work on expanding my business. I'm going to make dreams come true. 2016 started my dreams, 2017 is going to push them to start blossoming.

This will be my year. I'm going to make it my year. 2018 will be a dream come true after I'm done with 2017.