Baby Stuff

Have I told you how much I love the Bellingham IVF Clinic? :) This clinic is a very small (3-5) person run clinic - not with hoards of people coming in and out. You really get personalized attention and detail - for that - it is worth it. After I had posted on here for everyone to send their energy to them to call me - they called me the next day before 9am. I told the lady who I talked to about my blog and having told people to send me energy.......she laughed. BUT the funniest part is we had a few questions.... K called on Friday and late Friday afternoon I got a call at work....... it was Karen. She was calling to make sure all my blogging requirements were met before the weekend.......LOL She's a hoot.

I got my calendar in the mail yesterday for all my medicines. I started taking birth control last night and celebrated in the thought of not having a period in September ;o) I'll be skipping the placebos until October! YEAH!! (I won't be celebrating in the fact if this birth control does to me what the last did.......and made me puke! UGH........) They gave me a different prescription (and of course THIS type of birth control wasn't covered by insurance..... $45.00 later - with another refill to come in 28 days!) ggggggggrrrrrrr Oh well - seems minimal in comparison to all we'll be spending in the next months!!

We have been approved for our Home Equity loan - so that'll be very helpful financially for us (and will actually save us money in the long run).

We found out from Bham IVF that there are more options available to us. They have been very understanding of us not getting time off work to come to a few extra appointments, but then we are now realizing that we weren't possibly informed as thoroughly with K's IVF because of it. (and it is cheaper without this appointment) So, we have some discussing/deciding to do....and here are what it is:

1) ICSI - ICSI is an acronym for intracytoplasmic sperm injection - which is a long, fancy way of saying "inject sperm into the middle of the egg". ICSI is a very effective method to get fertilization of eggs in the IVF lab after they have been retrieved from the female partner. IVF with ICSI involves the use of specialized micromanipulation tools and equipment and inverted microscopes that enable embryologists to select and then pick up individual sperms in a tiny specially designed hollow ICSI needle. Then the needle is carefully advanced through the outer shell of the egg and egg membrane and the sperm is then injected into the inner part (cytoplasm) of the egg. This will usually result in normal fertilization in approximately 70-85% of eggs injected with viable sperm. First, the woman must be stimulated with medications and have an egg retrieval procedure so that we can obtain several eggs in order to attempt in vitro fertilization and ICSI. We spoke with the embryologist from Bellingham IVF and he strongly suggests we do it with frozen sperm. He gave numbers of something of this sort.....Most eggs would fertilize 60-70% without ICSI - but with ICSI 80-90%. Of course it cost $2,000 more - but heck - if we're spending the money - why not be sure?!

2) 3 day or a 5 day transfer - the five day is called a Blastocyst embryo transfer. Right now we are scheduled for the 5 day....which sounds better to both of us - but there are also other risks involved......so we'll be calling the embryologist in the next week or 2 to discuss more.

3) Where to buy the medicines from!? The pharmacy we used for K's medicines (which is the pharmacy that our clinic *usually* uses - the medicines will cost us $2,700) So, we're looking into quite a few options.......possibly even asking if they could let us use some of their samples and/or other medicines people haven't used in their cycles and brought in! This has potential for savings us tons of money. I don't know how it works for out of country and prescriptions......we're really close to Canada! :)

It looks like my retrieval will be on October 17th. The embryo's will be implanted on October 22nd with a possible pregnancy test on November 1st! :)

Keep up on my blog for updates....:o) it is going to get very exciting!!

Randi