Now that we know we have some financial assistance and can realistically move forward with IVF, we have begun the preliminary steps at The Fertility Center. I guess I should mention a little about the fertility program we chose. The Fertility Center is run by Dr. Robert Filer and his nurse practitioner, Michelle Munch. The main facility is in York, PA, but they have an outpatient office in Lancaster, which just happens to be directly above my office. It is VERY convenient. I think the location is a blessing because I can literally run upstairs for appointments and it does not drastically impact my work day. Since I will need a lot of monitoring and blood work with IVF, it will be nice not to have to leave my building or take much time away from seeing my patients.
Last week, I had an ultrasound to ensure that I have a healthy number of follicles and fortunately everything looked great. This week, we had a trial transfer to make sure the "pathway" for implanting embryos into my uterus was adequate. All was good there too. I just had to pee really, really bad. Dr. Filer made me laugh afterwards and said I could "wrap and run" with the sheet to the bathroom instead of taking the time to get dressed.
We sat down with Dr. Filer today and signed all of the consent forms, indicating that we understood the steps of IVF and everything we were about to go through. It was a LOT of information and I left there feeling like I needed to read through the information pack 10 more times. One piece of information that we found out is that we could freeze embryos for later use. What this means is that if the cycle with fresh embryos fails, we can use frozen embryos as back up. Dr. Filer said that their outcomes with frozen embryos are identical to fresh embryos because they only freeze good quality embryos. Other facilities have lower success rates with frozen embryos because they freeze the lower quality ones. What this also means for us is that we could potentially have another biological child together. They keep the frozen embryos indefinitely, until you are ready to use them again. So, if we are successful with this IVF cycle and choose to have another child in a couple years, we have embryos ready and waiting for us! We both honestly thought we would do IVF once and hopefully have one (or twins) through that and then adopt in the future. But now we have hope of having another biological child with fewer steps (and lower cost!!) using the frozen embryos. We still plan on adopting in the future, but it will be so nice to have the option of having more than one biological child!
There is always the chance that we will not have any good quality embryos or that IVF will not work and we'll be out over $13,000 with no child, but we try really hard not to think that way. You have to be positive in this journey or it's all too easy to slide into a really dark place.
Next up is a sonohystogram for me in a week or so and infectious disease screenings for both of us...
No comments:
Post a Comment