A Slightly Better Place

Well, I had my Dr. Slideshow debriefing with Dr. Gorgeous today (an appointment which was in the very surreal location of my home town, which appears to be her outpost as she colonizes the infertile universe in a 100 mile radius. "Hel-lo," she nearly sang, "I drove to see you today!"). Anyhoo... to make a very long story somewhat shorter, we covered a LOT of ground, including how to handle my current cycle and how she handles DE.

I will probably say more about DE later. But right now, much to my astonishment, my plan is to do it with her sometime in the spring (March? Gosh if I could sync that with spring break that would be fucking awesome). Her stats would seem to be in line with Dr. Slideshow's (but with a much smaller sample). And I didn't have that really icky feeling when she described "matching" me with a donor. There's a donor coordinator I'd have to meet with to talk over my priorities, number one of which is a proven pregnancy from a donor cycle. The bottom line is I felt comfortable for the first time thinking about this as a possibility, and I know that has everything to do with trusting her and knowing that she knows me. She was also suitably appalled by Dr. Slideshow's eSET mandate for single women. There's a lot more I could go into, and I haven't committed in any way or even told her I'm leaning this direction, but it's starting to feel like something I could actually do. Doing any cycle at Dr. Slideshow's office feels like a huge undertaking, just logistically, and I have a feeling whatever "benefits" a larger program offers would be undermined by the added stress of dealing with LG and traveling for a cycle.

Still, I'm doing at least one more cycle with my own eggs. What's interesting here is how different Dr. Gorgeous is in her understanding of my situation. She was pretty shocked to hear that he'd given me about a 0% chance of conception with IUI and suggested that he's really not sensitive to the particularities of my situation--that I'm doing IUI because I don't have a partner. When I said he was recommending IVF with my own eggs, she said, and I almost laughed, did he SEE your IVF stim sheet? (Not only did he see it, he scanned it and put it on a fucking computer monitor so I could look at it!) But here's the thing: her take is that my success rate with a medicated IUI at her clinic is about the same as the one he gave me for IVF (and actually much higher than the low estimate he gave me). So the plan:

She's putting me on the pill for 13 days so (a) I can go home for Thanksgiving and (b) follicles sync up precycle. The last day we do a repeat hysteroscopy. Then I start stims on cd 2. Once again, she has a new plan: simultaneous Femara and Follistim. I'd take Femara cd 2-6 and follistim cd 2-10 or so. She thought the endogenous fsh/lh (from Femara) would be helpful, and I have responded decently to it in the past. I like the idea of starting Follistim early because it's always seemed like the big push in my cycle (the boost on cd 7) came too late to be helpful, particularly on higher doses. It's new. It's different. And she just had a patient similar to me get pregnant on this protocol.

Today is better than yesterday; there's no doubt about that. But I'm a long long way from happy.