Last week, the hubby and I spent the afternoon at Madigan attending our IVF orientation. My anxiety was through the roof, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The orientation process is a group thing with all of the couples that will be cycling at the same time. There were about 10 couples who attended with us.
We had a short informational presentation on the basics of IVF from the doctor who is the head of the IVF program at Madigan. He went over the steps of IVF, risks, and statistics. Stuff that I kinda already knew but they had to go over with us for, I’m assuming, legal reasons. We also received a folder full of paperwork, schedules, instructions, and consent forms.
We, as a couple, had to make some decisions I never imagined myself making at this point in my life. Things like how many eggs do we want to fertilize? Do we want to freeze left over embryo’s “just in case”? What do we want to do with our leftover embryo’s if we don’t use them? How many embryo’s do you want to transfer on the Big Day? ICSI, assisted hatching, PGD testing? A little overwhelming huh?
Well, we had time to think about those things while we got some instructional and hands on time with giving shots. The IVF nurse who helps with the program at Madigan is absolutely wonderful; I have to say she is probably the biggest asset to Madigan’s IVF program. She always returns phone calls and emails, takes the time to explain things, and just generally tries to put worries at ease. She went over each couples individualized protocol: where to keep each med, how much medication and how to draw it up, which needle goes with what, how to inject the med, and just any questions we may have. The best piece of info we got during that session was her work cell phone number that we can text 24/7 when we begin suppression in early October.
Then we met with our doctor who would be doing our egg retrieval and transfer. He went more into depth on our protocol. Which now includes ICSI. ICSI is intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection – the basically pick out the best quality sperm and inject it directly into the egg so that it will fertilize. Normally they will just put the egg into a petri dish with the sperm and let it fertilize normally. He also advised us on how many embryo’s to transfer. Due to my age and being mostly unexplained infertility, they won’t transfer more than 2 embryos. The doctor said that based on the embryo quality when it comes time to transfer, he says we’ll be a good candidate for a single embryo transfer. Transferring 2 embryo’s increases our chances of multiples by about 25% (if I remember correctly). Hubby and I are still discussing this.
It’s an overwhelming process and there are so many things that come up that I didn’t ever even think about. I like to know exactly how things are going to happen. Ask my husband how anxious I get when things are out of my control. Oh well, I guess in this matter, I don’t have a choice.
Finding Fertility 