Our IVF Journey Begins...

To catch everyone up on our fertility saga...we had our 7th miscarriage in early December 2009. Unfortunately it turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy and my tubes ruptured. My doctor had to remove both my fallopian tubes during an emergency surgery. I recovered just fine; but our conceiving options were narrowed down to 1...In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Because of my age (36), we know that we don't have a very long time to wait so we decided to get started as soon as possible.

Today we went to the Nashville Fertility Clinic to have a consultation for IVF. We are familiar with the doctor because she helped us a few years ago in our search for answers regarding the miscarriages. After bringing her up to date on my recent history, she told us that we are good candidates for IVF. The only issue that was mentioned was my weight. I am above the weight recommendation for candidates but since I have lost so much weight recently and given what we've been through, she was not going to make it an issue (but I'm going to try to lose as much as possible before we start).

We told the doctor that we wanted to start the process as soon as possible. So we got as many of the prerequisites done today as possible (prelim ultrasound and blood tests). The only other prerequisite is an IVF class that we will attend on January 20th. After that we only need to wait for my next cycle to begin and we can start the IVF process. That will hopefully be early to mid February. I won't get into the details of how that works because I'm just learning myself! But what I can tell you is that once started, the IVF cycle will take roughly 6 weeks. At the moment, we're not sure how many cycles we may do if unsuccessful on any of the tries.

So that's all the details that we have so far. Now I'm going to get into something I've never really done before with everyone...how I'm REALLY handling all this. Maybe this will help me get through it all...

Let me start by saying that Brandon was off the charts excited today. Between all the information the doctor was giving and Brandon asking a million questions and interjecting stuff, I almost retreated into my happy place. It was WAY OVERWHELMING to say the least. It doesn't help that I've been the most emotional in my life since the surgery last month (sometimes feeling one step away from bipolar). Another thing I'm going to have to try to overcome is my pessimistic attitude. It's been my defense mechanism over the last 4 years....outwardly expect the worst and hide my optimism so I look like I'm handling it better because I expected the worst. It's demented logic (I know) but it's what I've been doing. So if you talk to me and I downplay our chances or seem very matter of fact about it all, know it's because I'm not good at opening up about feelings...mainly because I can cry at the drop of a hat and that just makes everyone around me uncomfortable. Brandon's the lucky one that gets to deal with my tears when they come (he's such a trooper!).

Well, I think that's enough therapy for one day! This was just the first day of this process that may possibly take months and I'm already exhausted physically and emotionally. Thanks to everyone for all their support, it is very needed and appreciated by us both. More to come....