One-day work up - the second time's the charm?

As promised, here's some of the details from our one-day work up a week ago.

Objectively, the day was pretty uneventful. I had the expectation that the whole thing would be a breeze (after all, we've done this before), but I was wrong. The one-day work up was surprisingly draining. By the end of the day, we were wrung out.

I started the day with a hysteroscopy, which hurt more than I remembered, and which was normal. Met with the donor nurse, who seemed OK. I am not warming to her as much as I did my prior IVF nurse, but oh well. We don't have to be buddies. When going over the huge binder they give you (my new "donor" one is grey, versus the white "IVF" one I was given before), she instructed me to be in close touch with her and basically said she is not going to be the one to be on top of everything. "I have 79 patients, so it's up to you to keep me up to date on all the details." Hmmm...Ok. I don't love hearing this, but if this is the case, it is good to know.

Will and I both had lots of blood drawn for communicables and we're running some additional genetics on Will that hadn't been done before (CF, SMA, thalessemia, etc.) - didn't see the point since I'm not a carrier, but now we'd rather know.

We met with Dr. Schl. and discussed everything that might help with implantation. We went over all the somewhat scientific things he supports (e.g., depot lupron - ugh, and the Denver miscarriage medication protocol of Claritin, Pepcid, and prednisone) as well as the more fringe immunological things that have been recommended to me by others (e.g., IVIG, intralipids, lovenox) and he reiterated he won't prescribe any of that but is willing to collaborate with someone else if that's what we want to do. So we'll have to decide. I'm not much of a believer in fringe myself, but we're at the edges of medical science with our situation, unfortunately.

We all acknowledged that while this donor egg attempt is promising, it may not work for me. And so we spoke together about using a gestational carrier in the future if need be. The basic gist of it was a positive one: that between my uterus and a gestational carrier's, and my eggs and a 23-year-old donor's, that somewhere in that mix we would finally succeed. We told Dr. Schl. that we have had very preliminary communication with someone who, knowing our story, generously offered to be a carrier. He was very enthusiastic about this. She won't be available until later in 2012 and we would need to get to know her much better and see if she is even still interested (it's been a while since we chatted about it) as well as have her medically screened. She has PCOS, which we told him and he said that that is absolutely no problem, which was a relief to hear. Even though we're doing the donor egg cycle right now, it was so helpful to discuss this, because if we did need to go this route, I feel much more comfortable with this person than with any of the anonymous profiles we looked at. Hopefully we'll learn I can carry a pregnancy, but it was really nice to begin to talk to him about what might happen if I can't and hear his genuine enthusiasm about it. (And those of you who know him know that he is not a generally enthusiastic guy!)

We met with the psychologist for the psych eval, which was fine but not really helpful. She seemed to conclude about 20 minutes in that we are very well read on this topic and have thoroughly considered issues like integrating a donor child into the immediate and extended family and the what's, when's, and how's of disclosure. And we have thought a lot about this. But interesting at least to see what the eval entailed.

Will also gave his sample for new chromatin assay and semen analysis without incident.

And then last but not least were the off-the-books visits. These were my highlights of the day. We saw our nurse and exchanged hugs and news.  And we met up with Danielle from genetics. She admired pics we have of our donor and said visually the match is a very close one, one of the best matches she's ever seen. And in general, she just made it so clear that she is rooting for us. She said she's kept my file at her desk all year rather than refiling it with the not-in-cycle files, and that every time she saw it, she'd tell herself, "I know they'll be back." "I know they're going to have a successful outcome somehow."

Please let it be true.

Mo

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