Some Details

We walked away from the appointment with Dr. Shomento filled with a peace, and some fear. We are definitely in the "unexplained infertility" category. IVF allows for some diagnostic testing to be done, to find out if we are still unexplained, or if there is some reason things aren't lining up.

She told us, the goal will be to harvest several eggs and create several embryos. Two will be implanted. The rest frozen...she said "for siblings of the first baby."

The frozen embyros and can stay frozen forever. Assuming there are some embyros frozen the next time we do IVF, whether it's for siblings, or another try, the cost will be way less.

Our biggest fears right now aren't even the IVF not working, though I know that we do have a deep seeded fear of that somewhere (and probably being ignored right now), it's me being on hormones and a lot of them. More than one dose of IUI. It's gonna be oh so hard. It's not fun feeling all the hormones in my body. Will I overcome that? Of course. And at least we know a little bit about what to expect, and we can prepare for it. The shots don't worry us anymore, but the effects make us feel weary. We have a treadmill now, and I really think that will be a huge help in my body feeling icky during the hormones, I can have an outlet to run it off in the cold winter months.

What we will be doing for IVF:

In November, on day 3 (here we go again with the Days) I will go to Havre for some blood work to determine how well my ovaries are functioning. This is called ovary reserve testing. Dr. Jensen talked with us about it. Basically, it will show if my ovaries are functioning as a normal 33 year-old, or as an older person, say 45 or older. If they are normal, we can wait a few months to start treatment, depending on our schedules, if they are not normal, every day counts, so we will start as soon as possible.

When we decide to start treatments we will have some lab work done on both of us, and an ultra sound for me.

Then along with all of Dr. Shomento's other patients who decide to start IVF the same month we do, I will be prescribed a birth control pill for 1 month.

From there, we will be given dates for hormone taking, dates for when we need to be down there for the egg retrieval, ultra sounds for me, and, to be honest I'm not even sure what all we have to be down there for. I have to stay for 7-10 days. After the implantation, I can go home. Joel can make 2 trips down, but not have to stay the 7-10 days.

We're wavering between thinking about it all the time and being hopeful, and just living day by day and waiting for the reserve testing results, and staying calm. We try not to think about how we had so much hope back when we started IUI at Mayo, and it failed. We try to believe that through this next step, God will give us a family. We really don't know what else to do. So we will, eventually, take this giant leap and hope.

I am going to throw out the ovulation test kit sticks...gone are the days of trying when someone or something tells us to. Hello are the days of IVF.