After the sperm count showed little improvement well after a year of his Varicocele surgery, we decided we would go back to meet with a fertility specialist. Don’t get me wrong, we kept busy from 2012 up until 2014…I got my master’s degree, we got a new dog, we remodeled our master bathroom, we put in new floors throughout our house, we traveled. We pretty much did everything we could to take our minds off trying to get pregnant. But deep down inside our minds were still there.
We ended up choosing a different fertility practice this time than where we had done our IUI’s. Let me tell you why. As I mentioned in a prior post, the previous office had numerous doctors with various locations. During our short time at the practice, we drove up to 2 hours away for an appointment. And we knew if we did IVF there, it would be even more driving (not done at all locations). We also disliked the idea of a different doctor possibly performing the procedures each time. The more times the same doctor is examining your uterus, the better we thought. Getting a second opinion from another fertility practice was very important to us as well.
We found another practice about 30 minutes from home, with a woman doctor this time. Both of us just felt more at ease when we went to our initial consultation with her. She spent at least an hour with us. We would not have to drive to different locations or see different doctors either. Of course, I had taken all of our records with all of the “test” results to this appointment. By now, these tests were over a year old, so guess what? Yep, you guessed it…REPEAT all tests! This entailed: a pap, blood work & a sperm count, genetic testing for both of us (a must before IVF), another HSG and SIS, etc.
All was normal with 2 exceptions: the sperm count and the genetic testing done on me. It came back that I was a carrier for Prothrombin Thrombophilia, Hemochromatosis, & Gaucher’s, and I had the MTHR deficiency condition.
After you do genetic testing, the genetic counselor calls you and reviews the results with you. I was told that none of what I was a carrier for, nor had a condition for, would affect reproduction. The new fertility specialist we were seeing confirmed this at our next meeting. In the case I became pregnant, all I would need to do is take baby aspirin for the Prothrombin & folic acid for the MTHR. Easy enough!
She went on to tell us what we prayed she wouldn’t; without IVF with ICSI there was no real chance of us conceiving on our own. And she said she wouldn’t bother to do IUI again and waste our money. OUCH.
So, we met with the financial coordinator to see what we would be in for if we decided to do IVF. We had already heard how costly it was. There are about 1 million different packages to choose from. Seriously! Packages can range from (here comes the jargon) 1 fresh cycle with 3 frozen cycles, to 3 fresh cycles with 2 frozen cycles, or you can just pay for one cycle at a time. To give you an idea, the price for a single fresh cycle with meds was around $14,000, and a multi-cycle (both fresh and frozen) was about $28,000. YIKES! Talk about breaking the bank. After talking with the financial coordinator, we both needed a stiff drink to say the least. How could we ever afford to have our family? 😞
Surviving INfertility 