9 posts tagged “infertility”
Wife went in for another ultrasound and blood check this morning. Everything looks good. She's down to six good follicles now. The extraction is set for Saturday morning. We have to be at the hospital at 6:30. That's A.M. Wife asked if I was sitting down before she told me. I was already so tired this morning I could barely move. I laid in bed for 15 minutes this morning, just petting Stinky, trying to gather the will power to make it as far as the shower.
In the spirit of this increasingly egalitarian and non-denominational country, I'd like to wish everyone a belated happy Eastover. Wife and I went out to dinner last night and, due largely to the Eastover holiday, the restaurant (and really all of downtown) was pretty empty. Which means we got excellent service at a normally crowded Mexican joint and extra tequila in my Margarita. Yumm...
In other news, Wife got her period Saturday, which means the IUI didn't work. She took a pregnancy test just to make sure -- negative. We were both pretty bummed. I came home early and made a nice dinner of chicken tits with lemon and capers, one of her favorites. I even made her eat at dining room table, rather than in front of the TV. She's going to the clinic this morning for a blood test, but it's just a formality. We're sure of the results.
P.S. It's the second week of April already, and it's snowing here. I don't live in Alaska. This isn't supposed to be happening. It should be 55 degrees and raining. Or 55 degrees and anything, other than snow.
I've accomplished my hopefully-father-to-be duties for the last two days. Not only escorted Wife to and from the clinic, but provided sperm on demand services. Ready, willing, and able. Yesiree.
On the way home this evening we stopped by the video store to look for a little ...umm... encouragement. We got something featuring Jenna Haze (hey, Wife picked it out. Who am I to disagree?). I've enjoyed her in several other movies. She has a certain enthusiasm for what she does that's really quite a turn on. Just not in this movie. Still cute, but a total bimbo. "Oh yes, fuck me with your big hard cock. yes. oh oh oh oh" Oh, gag me. That very quickly becomes a turn off, rather than a turn on.
However, the end result was successful. I wonder if anyone's ever asked her for an autograph saying, "Gee, I really enjoyed your movie. I conceived my first child to it"?
Today was the Big Day. Wife and I had our appointment at the clinic. When they called yesterday to confirm the appointment, the receptionist told Wife "Don't forget to bring along your donor." Sure makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. When we got there, the nurse comes out and greets Wife by name. I interject, "Hi. I'm The Donor. But you can call me 'The' ." At least I got a smirk out of her.
The best part of the whole process (from my point of view, anyway) was the "warm up" I got from Wife before we left the house. Obviously we couldn't go all the way, but a little taste of what was to come, if you'll pardon the pun, put me in a much better mood and made finishing at the clinic very easy.
Since I'm a tech guy and a control freak (I'll blog more about that another time -- I like Patty's idea of an "If you really knew me, you would know that...") I asked to watch what she did with my sperm (ok, maybe I'm just a bit possessive of the little guys). She used a centrifuge to spin dry the "sample" and separate the sperm from the seminal fluid. Then they get run through a couple of chemical filters to separate the strong, healthy swimmers from the lazy, slacker sperm. She showed us a "before" and "after" view under the microscope. This was really cool. The first grouping showed a bunch of little black lines, each one about a millimeter long and resembling a sans serif "I". Most of them were just sitting there, like cats in a sunny window. The "after" group had a more dense grouping, and they were all buzzing in place or running from one side of the screen to the other. Super sperm after a triple no-foam latte, or an offensive line after the snap. These guys were going somewhere and would not be denied.
Next step was the insertion. You'd think that having two women crowded around my wife's vagina would be every guy's dream. Not so much when lab coats and a speculum are involved (unless you have some really strange perversions, which I'm not going to get into here). They eventually found her elusive uterus, and used a catheter to squirt my dudes up there. She had to lie on the table and wait for 20 minutes afterwards, then we were released on our own recognizance.
Now all we can do is wait the two weeks until we know whether it worked. Next appointment is April 9th, and we were advised not to try any home pregnancy tests before then. Apparently the hormones in her blood from the injections can cause a false positive. Oh, and we're supposed to have intercourse tonight and again tomorrow. I win!
It's been a crazier-than-usual week. Sometimes good crazy, often not-so-good crazy. Like the day I went to a client's and nothing worked. I couldn't get Activesync to work wirelessly with Exchange on a stupid Motorola Q phone. This is normally a 10-minute job. I won't bore you with the technical details, but trust me -- it's not hard. Except on a Verizon phone. Turns out you need a special installer from Microsoft. That only took a 90-minute phone call to tech support to figure out. Then trying to install Access 97 (don't ask). Got cryptic error message. After 45 minutes of web surfing, I figured out that there's a known issue with Office 97 and the font file hatten.ttf. Who woulda thunk? I'd ask "why me?" but I know that's a fruitless endeavor.
In other news, Wife and I are in day 6 of our next attempt at fertility. We're doing Gonal F and Menopur, but at different dosages than the last time. It's also an abbreviated cycle, for reasons I don't completely understand. Sunday she gets the big intramuscular injection (read: bend over, baby) and Monday we go to the hospital for the turkey baster treatment insemination. This has given Wife hope again, but it's about the last big thing we can do before running out of insurance money. If it doesn't take, she's going to be devastated and I'm not sure what I'll do. Honestly, I'm still scared shitless. I think I'll just be numb until (if it works) several months into the pregnancy. Then it will hit me and I'll really start to panic.
I recently came to the realization that all of my pants were involved in a top-secret, highly-coordinated effort to reduce their waist size. Suddenly nothing I own fits me any more. It's clearly a problem with the cleaners or the washing machine, and seeing as it's way too expensive to replace the washing machine and I'm too lazy to switch cleaners, I did the next best thing: I went shopping.
Seeing as we're medical poor (similar to house poor, except you don't have any real estate to show for it), I decided to check out the sale at Kohls. Bad move. In retrospect, I should have given myself credit for at least some taste. The catalog had some decent looking clothes, but everything I saw in the store was hideously ugly. As in pink shirt with purple pants ugly. As in plastic shirts (i.e., polyester, rayon, modal, and every other unnatural fiber), baggy pleated pants, and every boring combination of stripes that says "I've completely given up on life." I may be getting older and heavier, but I'm not dead yet. Phullleeease.
So, when is Nordstrom's annual sale again?
Top 10 names that I will never inflict on a child:
- Brittany
- Tiffany
- Shanice
- Christian
- Mackenzie
- Madison
- Justin
- Derick
- Dakota
- Brooklyn
- Hunter
Unfortunately, the list of "out" names is much larger than the list of potential "in" names, so I ran a little long. We're just beginning to have fun with it.
P.S. Wife began her cycle today and picked up $800 worth of drugs, a huge difference from the $7K or so last time.
Instead I'm hiding out at SBUX, enjoying a leisurely breakfast. Wife and I met with the cute fertility doctor (hereafter referred to as Dr. Hotness) at 7 AFM this morning. We're still waiting for the rest of the bills from the IVF to roll in, but I think we've used about $20K of our $25K insurance limit. Our out-of-pocket costs will probably come to 15% - 20% of that and we really don't have a lot more to add. I wanted to discuss some of the results from previous testing (they did a sperm count on me during the IVF process and my numbers were low, but not terrible) and discuss next steps. What can we do with around $5K, since another round of IVF is, unfortunately, unattainable.
My visiting a urologist is not likely to produce any functional results. Dr. Hotness recommended IUI, which is doing the same regiment of fertility drugs for a couple of weeks to produce lots of super strong eggs, then trying to get pregnant the old fashioned way. We lose the advantage of genetic testing and the odds of success are lower than with IVF. But it's much less expensive, we have some drugs left over from last time, and the clinic has a program where they get samples and donated drugs to help defray the cost. My sperm counts are good enough that this has a reasonable chance of success. We'll start in a few weeks, at Wife's next cycle.
You can't imagine how happy this made her. She's been mopey and depressed for weeks now, afraid that we'll never become parents, that her dream is over, life as we know it is coming to an end, blah blah blah. I'm tenacious. I know there was more we could do, we just needed to figure out how to fit a square peg in a round hole.
This also means that I'm guaranteed to get laid in about 5 or 6 weeks. Mark your calendar.
I had another enlightening conversation with the fertility clinic the other day, where the suggested that, since I am a man and biologically incapable of having an egg implanted in me, that my insurance would not cover IVF. So, I called my mostly worthless health insurance company, spent 20 minutes on hold waiting for a supervisor, and yes indeed, they don't cover men for IVF. If Wife was on my plan it might be covered, after submitting a letter of predetermination from our doctor, but not me. They cover sperm aspiration (thankfully not necessary in our case -- I can still get them out the old fashioned way) and some diagnostic testing, but not any procedures that will help us.
This sucks, and has put a big dent in our plans, hopes, dreams, and urban renewal. Wife has become very depressed. She's mopey, drinking too much at night, and not really giving a shit about anything around our place. I'm tenacious by nature, and not ready to give up yet. I'll talk to a (an?) Urologist to see if there's anything I can do to get my numbers up. I also want another session our Fertility doctor to see if there's something less expensive than IVF we can try. We still haven't received final numbers on costs, but I think we'll have a few thousand left in coverage on Wife's insurance -- not enough for a round of IVF, but there's gotta be something we can try.
I have an MRI scheduled on my right knee scheduled for Friday night. All the major joints in my body are stiff and sore -- knees, elbows, shoulders. Getting down on my knees for 10 minutes last night to plug some cables into the back of a computer was torture. And I'm already taking 600mg Ibuprofen three times per day. Something's got to change. The pain is making me cranky and short tempered -- even more so than usual.
Oh, and on top of all the other fun I've been having, our heating system broke yesterday afternoon. It's 20 degrees outside and only slightly warmer inside. The boiler people were called, heat came on once about 10pm, and that was it for the night. They got called again this morning, and someone is rooting around in the valves and thermostats now. The thermometer in the living room, which usually reads high, says 61 right now. Even the cats are wearing turtleneck sweaters.
Ok, since I'm clearly not having enough fun in my life right now with marital therapy every other week (which really is going very well. Honest. I mean it. Quit looking at me like that!), the Mrs. and I are also working with a fertility specialist. We've been "sorta" trying to get pregnant for the last year. What this means is that she's not on the pill and we have sex occasionally. Sometimes we try to get it during the correct time of her cycle (and I'm not sure we're doing even that right--how embarrassing), but the few other occasions we do it it's just sex for the sake of sex.
Or at least sex for my sake. If left to her own devices, I think she'd be happy with some cuddling once a month. As a guy, this doesn't come close to being acceptable. I have hormones. Big, ugly, fat hormones; coursing through my veins. This means I need sex, and lots of it. Preferably at least twice a week (hold your comments to yourselves, you big studs who want it twice a day, I'm not there yet). Otherwise I go crazy. It's chemical thing; I can't help myself.
Even with this distinctly unequalized sex drive, we've been having unprotected sex for about a year now. Which means that, even with bad timing, we should be pregnant by now. And yet we're not. Hmmmm....let us ponder this for a minute. Ok, you guessed it. One, or possibly both of us, may have a problem with our reproductive parts. Who is the lucky winner of this week's drawing? We don't know that yet.
I went down to the fertility clinic for my test this afternoon. This basically consists of filling out paperwork, then jerking off into a jar. The nice woman behind the counter lead me into a small room with a large "Do Not Disturb" sign on the front, handed me the container and a little brown bag to put it in afterwards, and basically said "enjoy youself". Hmmm....cold, sterile room. Rack of heavily used Penthouse magazines (gross). Bedside table with one ancient, stupid-looking porno on it and a small tv/vcr combo mounted to a wall. My first thought was, "ok, where's the spy camera"?
Luckily, I'm a creative kinda guy and brought my own porno. Hey, that's what a PDA is for, right? Plus, I'd been saving up for several days, so despite the sterile atmosphere of the clinic I was rearing to go. I even did it twice (double your fun!) just to make sure.
Wiped up, put the jar in the bag, and handed it to the nice lady behind the counter. I wonder what she'd have said if I'd asked for assistance in producing. Results should come in a day or so from our fertility doctor.
The Mrs. also got 2 of her 3 first tests done today. They took some blood to check for hormone levels, and they put her legs up in the styrrups and did an ultrasound of her uturus and overies. Doesn't sound like fun to me, but she claims it wasn't that bad. Next time, I'm going along. Anything that gets stuck up her vigina should be attached to me. Or at least held by me. Or her.
Results come back, scattered over the next few days.
