Finally!

Two amazing things happened today:

1.  My dear friend, Jae, had her knees replaced last Thursday and today she was able to come home after a few extra days because of low blood pressure.  You should have heard my phone going off when they found out.  Bing, bing, bing.   I’ve been feeding and medicating her dogs and was there when her partner and mom brought her home.  It was so good to see with my own eyes that she was ok.  Going through a lot of pain but she looked good and has had improvement every day.  She made a little joke as she was struggling to get out of the car which told me that she was going to be ok.  Mo brought the dogs in one at a time and they seemed to know to be gentle.   What a sweet moment it was when she greeted her pups after being away from them so long.  It was good to see her smile.

2.  drumroll please!   I finally had my phone conference with Dr. AA.  FINALLY!  Jeez…. He was appropriately apologetic and spent an hour with me on the phone answering all my questions.  He thought it was embryonic factor that caused the failure and went on and on about it.  He also asked me how my period had been after the cycle and I told him it was a monster but typical of the periods I have had after cycling.  He said it did not indicate anything.   Not sure what he was getting at here and I was too focused on my own questions to think to ask him why he was asking that.  I don’t know my beta numbers and so now wonder if I had some sort of   ????   thing?   Chemical pregnancy or something?  I guess it doesn’t matter.

He agreed that I should have a new saline ultrasound and have some of the blood tests redone.  Apparently, he has a fancy new ultrasound machine that he’s just enamored  with (his word).  But he doesn’t think there will be anything different found and I’ll be good to move forward.

He said I could sign up for a new cycle as soon as January if I wanted.

I asked him about donor embryos.  He said they were usually the leftovers from someone else’s cycle and as such medium to poor quality.  He was sure to let me know that not every clinic only freezes the best ones as they do at his clinic.  I could spend the same amount of money or more and get more cycles of frozen donor embryos but still not have a very good chance statistically with each cycle.  He said for the money, he’d probably go with a new donor for a fresh cycle, if I could.

I asked him about my cousin, who has offered to be a surrogate, which got me thinking maybe she would be willing to donate eggs.  He said he’d have to evaluate her but it sounded like something that was possible.  He could refer me to an attorney.  I did ask about the emotional side and things that could go wrong legally and emotionally post birth.  He said he understood my concerns but couldn’t really advise me here.

He said there was nothing to keep me from going forward, not my age or weight or PCOS.

Finally, I brought up that during this last cycle, I felt like there were some calendar discrepancies and mess ups with the lab work which I then had to “clean up”.  I told him the sane part of my brain knew these were small things and were fixed easily by me making a phone call or email but that the psycho (my word) part of my brain kept wondering what else fell through the cracks that I didn’t catch and if it could have affected the outcome.   He did reassure me that none of those small things caused my negative outcome.  At one point, he said he “didn’t like” whatever mistake it was I was talking about at the time.  And he had a tone.  Like maybe I got someone in trouble.  I immediately said I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, that I thought he and his staff did a fantastic job but that now there were all these skipped phone consults and it just added to my worries.   I’ll admit to you, my friends, part of me wanted him to yell, “Heads will roll, my dear girl!  You’ll never have any of those troubles again!”  But probably nothing will happen.  Or at the least this conversation will cause things to tighten up around there but it is my fear that I’ll now be known as the “difficult” patient.  I think there was a Seinfeld episode about that.

Wow, that was a lot to type and my hat is off to anyone who stuck with it.  I mostly wanted to record it for my own memory.  Since you stuck with me I’ll reward you by telling you a secret:

Today, I had a consult for a tattoo!  And I made an appointment to GET a tattoo.  A sweet little sweet pea blossom for my Sweet Pea.  It took me a long time to work up the courage to go in the place and I’m fairly excited to be going through with it.