Hello my lovelies!
I've missed you! Sorry I've been AWOL all week (if not longer). It's just been a weird week, and my thoughts are so all over the place that every time I start a post I've been unable to finish it for one reason or another.
We decided to go ahead and do treatment this month (the emotions of which are probably why I'm having a hard time concentrating lately). I started stims on Tuesday (exactly the same protocol as last time, since that's what worked) and had my first follie check yesterday. Looks like I'll have three good follies this time - after 4 days of stims, I had one at 11 and two at 10 (and several little ones around 7). Last time I only had two and got pregnant, so while I used to get excited about three, now I'm a little scared I could end up like Austin (a grad who just had trips after IUI))!
The next follie check is tomorrow morning, and the IUI should be toward the end of this week.
SO much has happened around here in the last week that I can't even remember everything I wanted to comment on!
HUGE welcome back to Titi and Luvvie!!
OMM, DE is a very personal decision, and I think we're all mature enough here to recognize that. I imagine your thoughts on the matter will continue to go back and forth, even after you start treatment. When you and your DH start to second-guess yourselves and doubt the choice you made, go back and remind yourselves of why you made the decision. You might even want to write down all the reasons why you're choosing DE now and date it, so that when questions do come up again, you can refer to that letter you wrote to yourselves and remember why you chose it. Hooray for the
from the high-risk dr! But seriously, why do some drs only tell us what they think we want to hear instead of just being straightforward with us? IMO there's no excuse for him telling you one thing and your RE another. I'm glad you were able to get that straightened out. I know it feels like you're waiting forever before you can get started, but it will be here before you know it.
Padbrat, I am SO excited for you!!!! How exciting to imagine what your donor looks like - it really does make it more real! At my clinic's DE program, they show you a picture of the potential donors as toddlers (in addition to stats about what they look like, height, weight, education level, etc) so you can see what they looked like as LOs for yourself without compromising their anonymity... any chance you could get a baby pic of your donor?
Twinkle, I'm glad the HSG went smoothly.
Dwrgi, congrats on graduating from special needs!
Keep working on sorting out your next steps. IVF is truly a trial-and-error process - the drs have no idea how that first round is going to go because they cannot accurately predict how your body is going to respond until you get started. That's why an individual's chances of IVF success go up if you go through more than one round. My counselor likes to tell me to view IVF as a very expensive diagnostic test that
might produce a pregnancy as a bonus, not as a way to get pregnant. The drs can learn a LOT by observing what happens during that first round - how your body responds to stims, how the sperm behave, how fertilization goes, whether or not implantation is successful, etc. So keep at it - if you are willing and able to try again, your clinic (or any other you choose to go to) will be able to take what they learned from this first round and apply it to a second, hopefully giving you a better shot at a baby.
Big
to everyone else.