For the first time since moving to Georgia in 2012, my husband and I did not make our usual December trip north to spend a few weeks visiting our family and northeastern-based friends during the holiday season. Frankly, after this past year’s ups and downs (mostly downs) related to IVF, we simply didn’t have it in us. We love our families and we miss our friends (and family), but avoiding 4+ days in the car (two up and two back, plus all the time driving around between family members and friends), maintaining our normal work environment and a regular-ish exercise schedule, and spending time with local friends and each other and actually having time to reset was very, very needed.
But now it’s January, and that means it’s time to begin preparing to restart the IVF process, which sadly includes weaning myself off of caffeine again. I called the head nurse at the fertility clinic last week to learn next steps, and after some phone tag, we finally connected toward the end of last week. (It happened to be while I was in the middle of running a strategic planning meeting for a client, but when a doctor’s office calls, you’ve got to take the call, and luckily my client is amazingly understanding.) As with all things IVF-related, the timeline is pretty fuzzy.
I’m supposed to call the doctor’s office when I start my next period, and then I’ll begin taking birth control pills on Day 2 so they can control the timing of everything after that. They want to do the same protocol as before in terms of hormone meds and timing as it’s basically a luck of the draw in terms of what eggs they’re able to retrieve, and the previous protocols pretty much did what they’re supposed to do. As to when the meds are going to start, my best guess is sometime in mid-February, but the exact date is still to be determined based on two potential complications/delays:
Complication/delay possibility #1: There’s a chance I’ll need to get bloodwork done on Day 3 — a new thing required by insurance. However, since our insurance doesn’t believe in covering any aspect of fertility treatments (thanks, BCBS), the nurse is checking to see whether I really need to get that done. The complication with getting Day 3 labs is that I’m very likely going to be in another city participating in meetings for a different client, or I’ll be in the midst of traveling home from the midwest back to southwest Georgia, an all-day affair with zero room to find a lab. If it turns out that I DO need to get that lab work done, it’s possible that we’ll need to punt the IVF start by a month so I’ll be in my normal surroundings with a blood lab nearby.
Complication/delay possibility #2: The nurse said the doctor was thinking about having me do another HSG (hysterosalpingography), which, according to Wikipedia, is “also known as uterosalpingography, and is a radiologic procedure to investigate the shape of the uterine cavity and the shape and patency of the fallopian tubes. It injects a radio-opaque material into the cervical canal and usually fluoroscopy with image intensification.” It’s an outpatient procedure that I last had in August 2017. Since it’s been over a year, the doctor is thinking that it may be time for an updated scan. My memories of this procedure are of awful, horrible pain in my lower abdomen (the kind of pain where I started sweating profusely, got dizzy, and wasn’t sure if I was about to pass out or vomit, but luckily neither happened), but at least that level of pain only lasted a minute. Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to doing another HSG, but I get that it doesn’t make sense to start another attempt at IVF without first making sure that all the parts are operating correctly-ish. If the scan comes back normal, then we should be able to set an IVF start date. If it comes back showing polyps, fibroids, or anything else, then we have to deal with those first.
Basically, I know that I have one week left of being in my normal environment. Then I have a week at a client’s location in the midwest (it’s going to be SO COLD), and when I come back, my timeline is completely and totally up in the air. There are some things I have to plan around (for example, my husband landed a good part in our local community theater so I have to make sure that any procedures that require him to be with me don’t happen on dress rehearsal or performance days), but other than that, we can’t make any definite plans beginning in February. I’ve gotten slightly better at dealing with the uncertainty of it all once the med protocol starts, but right now I’m not even sure when everything is going to start, except for a vague “hopefully sometime in February.” It makes me kind of nuts.
Next update will be when I have a firmer idea of the IVF start date (hopefully soon).