After having some labs done to determine if I had actually ovulated or not, I scheduled an appointment with my doctor to discuss doing medicated cycles with monitoring. I wanted to know what was happening inside of my ovaries (if anything at all) when I took the fertility meds since my ovulation tests were never very clear.
When I went in to talk with her she confirmed that I did ovulate which was a positive even though it didn't result in a pregnancy. She then explained to me how a monitored cycle would work and gave me a breakdown of the options and their cost. Keep in mind, most insurances don't cover any fertility treatments and ours falls into that category so we have to pay everything up front each appointment.
Basically we had two choices, timed intercourse or an IUI. Both processes started out with the same instructions: Go in for a baseline ultrasound ($163), take medicine for 5 days starting within the first 5 days of your cycle ($17), go back in for a mid-cycle scan around cycle day 11 or 12 ($163), and use the trigger shot ($100) on the day instructed. Once we had reached that point, we would either do timed intercourse (which is pretty self-explanatory) on the day of the trigger shot and the following two days or we would come in a couple days after the trigger shot for an insemination ($260).
Now, if you've read my other posts, you're probably thinking "didn't they tell them that doing an IUI with Aaron's sperm was pointless?" and the answer to that is yes. On the day of the insemination, the man gives a sample and they then "wash" or "spin" the sperm to separate the good from the bad and get rid of the excess fluids and cells. When doing an IUI, they say a man should have 5 million sperm per milliliter and they prefer him to have 10 million so with our barely any on a good day, they didn't recommend wasting the time and money to even try. After our appointment at UNC I had made it very clear to my doctor that we wanted to exhaust all other options for having a biological baby before we even discussed IVF. I'm not sure if that's why she gave me the option but it was very surprising when she said we could go the IUI route if we wanted.
It just so happened on the day of my appointment I was already on day 4 or 5 of my cycle and we would have to make a decision that day if we wanted to do any treatments that month. The way I saw it, it seemed stupid to pay half the money for an IUI and just do timed intercourse. She probably thought I was crazy for being as excited as I was when I told her we'd do an IUI.
Aaron couldn't get off from work that day so when I called to tell him we were doing exactly what they told us we couldn't do from day one, I could hear the confusion in his voice. We didn't have much time to talk but I explained to him what was going on and told him that I was going to go ahead with my baseline ultrasound that day and she would start me on meds.
When my doctor performed my ultrasound she found two decently-sized cysts on my ovary. She said that they were probably caused from the Letrozole I had taken the previous cycle and that taking any additional fertility drugs would only cause them to grow. She recommended that we postpone treatments for a month and then I would come back in to see if they were gone, otherwise I'd have to go on birth control to make them dissolve. I was totally fine when she told me about the cysts but when she mentioned birth control my mind went into panic mode. Why would I go on birth control when I'm trying to get pregnant?
Thankfully I serve a mighty, mighty God and when I went back for my follow-up, those cysts were completely gone. My doctor said that she was also going to switch me to Clomid, the other fertility drug that produces a higher chance of being pregnant with multiples, in hopes of preventing me from getting anymore cysts from the other medicine.
So there we were about to start our first round of IUI (which they told us we couldn't do) using Clomid (which they told us I shouldn't take), I just couldn't help but hope that this was going to be the end of our infertility.
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