Hello everyone,
Alright.. so I finally have something new to report
regarding my “What’s Next” fertility treatments. We had our follow-up
appointment on the 8th of October, it was over tele-health witch
means over the computer kinda like skype. All we had to do was go to the
hospital in our small town on our scheduled day and time and we got to talk to
him over a computer. It was pretty neat, despite the run down looking "boardroom" they had for us.. Check out the picture below.
I had booked this appointment the minute I started bleeding
5 days post my IUI (August 5
th) because I wanted to know what
went wrong… why I bled so soon and help ease my worries because the whole
process leading up to the 2WW period went as planned.. I didn't think I’d have
to wait over 2 months.. but I guess I’m used to the wait.
Anyways back to the appointment, we went in there not really
sure what to tell him, what we wanted to do next.. the main thing we wanted to
know was
WHAT WENT WRONG and how can we make sure it does not happen again..
like really we had such a good cycle and 3 perfect looking follicles, great
sperm and then bleeding.. UGH! Last time we saw the Dr we told him we were
starting a
GOFUNDME to raise money for IVF and we were hoping to do it the minute
we had the funds.. Now realistically we do NOT have the fund for IVF because we did not get the support we had planned on and had to keep dipping in the IVF fund to do the IUI.. I needed 6 300iu Gonal-F pens + a 75iu pen, + Ovidrel + gas to get there and back + days I had to take off work + parking witch is usually between $12-$15. We
have been raising money in our
page but
it hasn’t raised close to enough money yet to help pay for the treatment. Our
dilemma is I don’t want to keep wasting months of not doing anything till
we raise money because we really have no idea how long that will take and so we had to tell the Dr that IVF is no longer in our "near" future and we have to put it on hold till the funds start rolling in..
The Dr told us that he prefer we not do IVF right away anyways because he says we did not master my dosage yet and he did not feel confident proceeding with IVF till we can get my ovaries/follicles to grow in less time.. (the would grow to the right size but would take around 16-20 days so that means alot more injections and alot more follow ups).
Here’s the info the Doctor gave us:
- IUI#2 looked way better then IUI#1..even if I needed an increase in dosage.
- During my IUI#2 my estrogen got up to around 1994
- My follicles grew to a solid 19 - 16 - 16 witch he says raises a little bit of anxiety..
- Ovulation was good
- No use of progesterone.. not good (should have been given some..)
- My starting Gonal-F dosage should have been higher...
- I am not stimulating well
- progesterone level way too low
- My September 24th blood work results showed that my thyroid level has gotten better with the med increase. It used to be in the high 4's and is now at 3.2. Still high in my books but Dr said he was going to keep me at the same dosage for now.
Dr gave a bunch of information but most of it I don’t remember as he was talking too fast and mumbling it to himself for me to understand it and write it down.
Dr was like, alright where you can go from here is...
Option 1:
- IUI with Gonal-F starting dose minimum 125 then move on to 150, 5 days in.
Option 2:
- IVF (I then asked him what my chances of success with IVF would be considering my IUI track)
His answer was that his only concern was that I don't have particularly very high progesterone levels.. and said "in theory we would be kicking the shit out of your ovaries" and says I will need alot of medication to get me to ovulate well. He also said I have a reasonable chance that things would work as long as the stimulation part goes well and that they give me enough drugs. Says he would be incline to suggest we do another IUI because he wants to get me to stimulate properly in order to give a much better indication to how to stimulate me for IVF.. how big a dose we need to get to before we see success..
All this being said...
Our new game plan is do yet another IUI. Doctor’s reasoning
for this is that he thinks we still don’t have the right dosage packed down
since it took me around 2 weeks to grow my follicles to the right size and we
had to keep increasing my gonal-f dosages.. Doctor said my body was “not
stimulating well”. Also Dr said the reason I bled so soon was because my
progesterone level on the 2nd half was very low, this meant that my
body did not act like it was trying to get pregnant. Apparently my estrogen level was great,
he said it reached up to 2000 and I had 3 nice follicles 19, 16, 16. So.. he
wants us to try another IUI and throw at it all we got.. this means very high
dosages and new meds also adding progesterone to the mix to trick my body in
thinking it’s pregnant.
Instead of using Gonal-F injections, I would use
Menopure. I would start my dosage at 125 and go up to 150. I did a little bit
of research on this brand/type of injections.. This is the link I found .
For the progesterone injections I would use Prometrium, 200mg in the AM and 200mg in the PM. This
brand of injections is new to me as well so I looked it up and… This is the information I found
This means I am to take 3
injections a day.. and on days where I need to empty a pen I would inject 4
times a day. This fact scares the crap out of me seeing I hate needles and just
1 a day for 16 days was a huge deal for me. (Totally freaking out.. needles
HURT like hell, I don’t care what others say, when I injected myself I had good
days where it did not hurt as much and bad days where I would hit a weird spot
and it would hurt so bad I had to pull the needle out and try again in a
different spot). I always injected in the recommended areas so no idea why some
areas on some days hurt more then others but it did. The last 3 days of
injections were the worst. I was running out of areas to inject myself where I
was more certain was “safe” to inject.
So this is it.. our new game plan.. Sorry it took me 2 months to write this post!! It has just been sitting there in my draft as a ruff copy. The pictures below was my husband and I hanging out in the room taking silly pictures after it was all said and done. Wanted to take these for my scrapbook and memories.. What this journey all takes.. and how we cope with it all.
I will make a new post at some point soon with more information on Menopur and Prometrium... like the list of side effects and i'll youtube what the injections look like.. I need to prepare myself for this as I'm extremely nervous!
The Infertile Mr & Mrs White
