Our NEW Plan

Mike's surgery: So far, everything looks good and is healing. Mike went back to work this week...he's a little sore, but Dr. Lipson warned him he would be. Now it's just a waiting game to see if the surgery corrected anything other than the varicocele. It will take 75-90 days before we'll know anything.

We met with Dr. Behera this week to make a "plan" for what comes next for us. She is due to deliver her 4th child August 5th, so we wanted to sit down with her before she left on maternity leave. She is only planning to be out of the office for one month, so Dr. Behera should be back by the time our plan is ready for action.

In September, the 75 day mark will hit...so the plan is to have Mike do another test. If the results show a big enough increase (from 5.6 mil to at least 10 mil) then we will try another IUI. If the results don't show what we need, we will wait until the 90 day mark and do the test again. At that point, if the numbers are good enough we will do the IUI...possibly several depending on the numbers.

If there is no increase after 90 days, we will have to begin discussion about our "other options". We spoke with Dr. Behera briefly about IVF, and we picked up the pricing information when we were there. We are keeping our hopes high that the surgery helped...because I don't have a clue how we would possibly afford IVF.

The chances are much higher these days of IVF working, and hopefully if we went this route we would be able to harvest enough eggs and have numerous healthy embryos created. Dr. Behera said she would hope to harvest 10 eggs (5 from each side) and in a perfect world that would give us 10 healthy embryos. The first month one or two would be implanted and the remainder would be frozen. If I was to get pregnant the first month, the embryos would remain frozen until we wanted to try for a second child. If it didn't work the first month, we'd obviously use the embryos until they were gone or we were pregnant.

One positive side of IVF (if it worked) is the fact we'd have frozen embryos to use later. Dr. Behera mentioned in 5+ years I'd still have 30 year old eggs frozen instead of harvesting my 35+ year old eggs...obviously the older a woman is the more risk there is. Half glass full, right? :)

If we are able to go the IUI route, Dr. Behera will triple the hormones I took the first go-round. She doesn't think what I took helped as much as I needed it to. Since I don't produce enough progesterone and apparently don't ovulate well either, I guess it can't hurt to help the process along. The extra drugs make it quite a bit more money per IUI we do (and they aren't cheap to begin with), but we'll have to deal with that when we get there.

Aside from IVF, there is also adoption...but we aren't sure how we feel about that. I guess if we have to start discussing options, we'll have to do some soul searching and figure out what is right for our family.