Home again, home again: Back from the one-day work up

We've returned from the Rocky Mountain clinic, and I have much to say about our journey, which will likely trickle out over the course of a few posts.

While out west, we saw a brewery called "Rock Bottom" and I thought, that's fitting. That's why we're here - we've hit rock bottom in this Trying To Conceive business.


We're so close to our absolute nadir of hope that we flew halfway across the country for potentially our last shot at having a genetically related child. We have long heard of this fabled Colorado clinic and had done a phone consult with their director way back in Feb. 2009. At that point, he had been quite sobering in his opinion, but had recommended a comprehensive chromosomal screening called microarray as our best option if we wanted to try one more time with my eggs.

To recap everything between the phone consult and now, we've done two more IVF cycles at our NYC clinic, planned to go out to Colorado twice, but gotten pregnant both times, and subsequently miscarried both pregnancies. So it feels a bit crazy but really kind of cool to actually finally make it to the one-day work up. We brought all of our information with us, curious to see what this clinic and specifically their head doctor, Dr. Schl. would have to say.

What a whirlwind trip - there was really not a moment of downtime. Will and I were both pleasantly impressed with the Colorado clinic's professionalism and efficiency. And honestly, at this point, I'm a bit cynical and am almost looking for something to criticize. So it was quite something that consistently we found this clinic to be really on their game.

For example, throughout the day of appointments, everyone we encountered had read my chart and knew our history. This clinic definitely gives an impression of knowing what they are doing. And when we met with Dr. Schl., he was perfectly pleasant and very informed and articulate, despite his reputation for not having the best bedside manner. He didn't sugarcoat anything, not a morsel of it. But he wasn't overly harsh in the way he delivered what seemed to be his honest opinion either.

Below is our schedule for the day. It was pretty back-to-back and well-organized. Lots of information presented and many tests and some procedures done. I expected this to all be (yawn) redundant (and I therefore predicted I would be annoyed) and some of the things were redundant of course, but there were a number of interesting things we discovered (in bold below):

9:00 - 9: 30: (but it ran longer): met with Dr. Schl (will post details in a separate post. Very interesting chat).

9:30-10:00: met with laboratory people and signed many consents.

10:30-11:00: very detailed ultrasound for me, semen analysis for Will. Turns out I have three fibroids that won't affect anything. According to some kind of doppler scan, I also have blood flow resistance to my uterus - for which they recommended 8 sessions of electro-acupuncture before embryo transfer. Who knew?

11:00-12:00: met with IVF nurse for full hour of education on how things work at this clinic in terms of contact with staff, cycling, testing, etc. Cool to see how they do things as compared to my clinic (more on this later). Geesh - this clinic really wants us to be informed - they presented us with a full binder of materials and literature - this is more info than my clinic has ever given me across two years of treatments.

12:00-1:00: lunch (was supposed to be a half hour but they had mercy on us).

1:00-2:00: met with IVF nurse for another full hour for education on genetic testing required for heritable diseases, required communicable disease testing, medication administration, etc. Good Lord, these people are thorough in their written materials and presentations (hmmm...does someone on staff have obsessive compulsive personality disorder, perhaps? Across the board, the attention to detail was...actually a little scary...but also kind of comforting.)

2:00-2:30: lots of blood work, plus was offered and accepted the chance to get the H1N1 shot - cool! - it's not available at my hospital yet. Don't have it in front of me so can't remember everything that was ordered in terms of bloodwork, but at least two things were new: AMH testing and CMV antibody testing. Will be curious to see results.

2:30-3:00: office hysteroscopy with Dr. Schl. Hurt less than I thought it would. (Given that this cost $645, I was slightly annoyed that as expected, everything in ye ole' uterine cavity is normal). Structural problems are not our problem.

3:00-3:45: met with genetic counselor (thought this meeting would be totally redundant and annoying, but it turned out to be quite useful and surprising...so much so that I will tell you about it in a separate post).

We arrived home very late last night, picked up our puppy, and dropped like dead people into bed. Right now Will and I are trying to dig out from all that went on in our work while we were away and emotionally process everything we heard. As well as attend to Ms. Moxie who had to go to (gasp! she's just a puppy!) a pet sitter while we were away.

Everything we saw and learned gave us a lot to think about. I promise to post again soon when I can. Bottom line, at the moment, we are anticipating we will likely give this IVF with microarray thing a try. It may or may not help us, but at least we'll know. And maybe then we can move forward. Or, even better, although probably unlikely, maybe IVF with microarray will actually work and we'll end up with a baby. Wouldn't that be something.

Mo