The appointment with Dr Candour was good. Not good as in: I had a good time, we laughed, we shared a glass of wine; but good as in he listened, he said sorry, he gave us honest opinions. He wants to share the letter I wrote describing our experiences this cycle - good and bad - with his staff. He told us he thought they had lost our trust, and that if we wanted to go elsewhere he'd understand. I immediately decided that he was trying to fire us as patients. He insisted he wasn't, just trying to give us an out if we wanted one. Cynical bitch that I am - H. saw no such subtext!
Eventually I decided to believe him. He told me that if at any point in the next cycle I have questions that his staff aren't answering, I should just call his assistant. If he is around, he will take the call. If he is not, he will call me back that evening. He had even found me some additional research papers to look at to complement what I'd read. It's the paper that justifies their clinical practice, I'll post the title some other time.
We came out with a game plan, which is to do IVF. He didn't recommend it, but when I asked about it, he eventually, after much prodding, agreed it was probably the right choice at this point. Since IUI, as he put it, "will not be straightforward for you," I don't see any point in messing around with it any more. At 38.75 I don't feel like waiting around, particularly since they will not do IUI two cycles in a row. That he was most definite about - he insisted that after producing four follicles my left ovary would be twice as large as it should be and it needed time to recover. Of course they could do an IUI with no drugs, but I think he thinks that is quite pointless. I'll ask him. Not because it will change our course now, but because I'd like to know.
So we're booked in for the set-up appointment on 7 September where we get to answer all sorts of questions about our preferences for our embryos, and presumably learn even more about injections, get our prescriptions sorted out. My clinic doesn't do the sniffy Synarel, so it's injections for me from the get go. But no progesterone injections - they use progesterone pessaries. Rectal pessaries. Anyone else do those? Oh, and hand over £1,900. How silly of me to forget that.
I should start a new cycle about 2 weeks after that. Suppression starts on day 21 of that cycle, all things being well and me not being cystic or high FSH, yada yada yada. So we'll be doing retrieval some time in the last week of October. Assuming we don't get cancelled. Fuck. The last week of October. Until I just sat and calculated it I had no idea how far away that was. That's a really really long way away. Damn my clinic and their concern for my health. Why can't we get started now????
I have another post brewing about how I feel about the decision to go for IVF, but it's a post on its own, so I'll work on it tomorrow and post it separately.
Thanks again to you all for your comments on the last post. If I wasn't so fat I'd be baking this weekend and at least able to post pictures of the cookies you requested a few weeks ago. But I gained three pounds in the last month, and am now 10 pounds heavier than this time last year. Enough is enough. I'm not going to kill myself, but I am going to get back into proper, minimum three times a week exercise and eating a lot less crap. I know I feel better when my clothes fit. I know I do.
One batch of brownies wouldn't hurt, though, would it?
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