November ICLW 2010

I haven't done ICLW in a while. If you're here through IComLeavWe, then welcome!

I am 30, my husband is 34, and we have one son who we conceived with our first IVF cycle. We needed IVF due to MFI, endometriosis, and one patent fallopian tube. After our second IVF cycle which was cancelled due to "genetically abnormal embryos" (all had multiple nuclei), we were moving onto adoption. We'd run out of money in our insurance cap for infertility services, and we wanted another child.

We had chosen our adoption agency, decided we wanted a domestic adoption, and next was to come up with the money for this endeavor. We did the fundraising thing with one successful fundraiser (a huge yard sale by donation only), and one very unsuccessful one (Longaberger basket and Vera Bradley bags Bingo)where we lost everything we had made on the first one, and money we had put into it ourselves. You can read more about that disaster here. We had alot of negative comments about fundraising for the adoption (I mean, we don't know anyone who has $20K sitting in their bank accounts but ok), and we decided we weren't going to go that route anymore. If we adopted it would be through grants, saving for a few years, etc. Then we got news that our fertility clinic was merging with another major clinic in the area, and that it would be less expensive to do another IVF cycle. You can read about that here.

The plan at that point changed to saving up the $5000 it would likely cost us for another IVF cycle and hopefully doing it sometime this year. However, I fell off of a ladder in March and broke my wrist in 4 places, required surgery for it in May, and didn't return to work until late July, so that got put on the back burner. Murphy's Law every time it seems. While I was out on short term disability for my wrist, I got our open enrollment info for our insurance. The good news was that our insurance was increasing our cap for infertility benefits, the bad news (for some) was that IUI and IVF benefits would be grouped together in that cap. It wasn't bad news for us because we'd never been candidates for an IUI, so we'd only used the insurance money towards IVF. This meant we should be able to do one last cycle. You can read about that here.

It came to October and we began our precycle testing. We did the semen analysis, cd 3 bloodwork, and next was my HSG. Of course, Murphy's Law came into play again. On my previous HSG back in 2006, they determined I had either a hydrosalpinx on the right side or a blocked tube. After further investigation with an ultrasound they thought it was just a blocked tube. This was great news, it wouldn't require surgery before we could do an IVF cycle, and the cycle resulted in a beautiful boy that December. We didn't require an HSG before our last IVF cycle in 2009 (it only has to be done every so often), but we did have a sono-HSG done, basically done by ultrasound only, not under fluoroscopy. Nothing had changed as far as we could tell, the right tube was still blocked. So when I went in for my HSG this year, I prayed that it would be the same, that nothing would have changed. Of course, as I said before, thank you Murphy's Law, something had. It turns out that all along we did have a hydrosalpinx, most likely caused by my endometriosis. Our first child was even more a miracle than we'd thought given the research we read. This post covers it. Our fertility specialist believed we could do another cycle and have the same results as our first cycle, but if you've seen our luck, you wouldn't trust it. We decided that to be able to feel comfortable with whatever results from our next IVF cycle, we had to make everything optimal, including removing my right tube. I had this done November 16th laproscopically and all went well.

Unfortunately, it seems my period never stopped from the end of October as I've been bleeding since the 27th, so I'm hoping after my next one is due, this bleeding stops, maybe we can try on our own this next cycle, and if it's unsuccessful, we will continue with our IVF plans in late December.

We appreciate all the support, prayers and thoughts we can get! Thanks!