The Plan

We went to see Dr. Butler this morning to discuss our lab results and what our next step would be. As soon as we sat down, he told us that everything had come back completely normal. Including my glucose/insulin tests. Since we've ruled out any endocrine issues with me and Thomas is normal, that means surgery. He will perform a laparoscopy on October 15th (the earliest available!) which will involve putting me under general anesthesia (again) and making a small incision in my belly button. He'll then insert a scope into my abdominal cavity to look at my reproductive organs to look for any abnormalities. He'll also inject dye to look at my fallopian tubes like we had planned to do at a different time, so 2 birds, 1 stone. If he finds anything abnormal, he'll fix it if he can (meaning endometriosis, blocked tube, etc.). If there's other stuff involved, like bowel, then I'll have to go see someone else about that. Oh wait...I already have a general surgeon! He said 90% of what he may find he can fix. Hopefully there won't be anything to find! After the surgery, I'll go home the same day and take it easy for a few days. Definitely not the month off work like my past two surgeries. We'll then meet back with him a few days later and discuss what he found. If everything's okay, we'll start the injectable drugs, which Dr. Butler refers to as "the big guns."

I give these to myself for several days (they come in a pen like an Epi-pen) and we monitor when I will ovulate. Once I'm ready to ovulate, I will go to the doctor's office and take a specimen from Thomas with me. They'll take his specimen, wash it, select the best-looking sperm, and then they'll insert it close to my fallopian tubes. I know that's kind of graphic, but that's the gist. Depending on what they find during the surgery, I'll do between 3-6 cycles of the injectable drugs before we move on to in-vitro fertilization. We didn't start with that because Thomas is normal. For people who mainly have a problem ovulating, they usually get pregnant within 1-3 cycles of using the drugs. For those that have another issue, such as endometriosis, it may take 3-5 cycles.

I asked about the rates of miscarriage with these drugs and he said the rates are the same as any other infertility treatment. It's the underlying cause of the infertility that causes the miscarriages. We also talked about the possibility of multiple births because that's a major risk with doing these drugs. He said 80-85% are single births. ~15% are twins, and less than 5% are triplets. He said in his career of 7000 cycles, he's only had 2 instances of quadruplets.

I really like this doctor because he's very knowledgeable and he's got his crap together. He goes over my stuff before we get there, so he knows the plan before talking to us. He also sounds very optimistic about our outcome, so that makes me feel better. Thomas likes him too and he doesn't like any doctors! I wish the surgery wasn't all the way in October, but at least we don't have to worry about anything until then...we can just relax for the next 2 months. He said his feelings wouldn't be hurt if we got pregnant between now and then, but he would take credit for it because he scared us into it by scheduling the surgery. Ha!

So that's all for now. If I remember anything I forgot, I'll post it later. Thomas is still asleep since he didn't go to bed until around 2 this afternoon. He stayed up this morning for the appointment and we ran some errands after that. Ah...the joys of night shift! I miss the atmosphere of it myself, but not enough to give up sleeping like a normal person!

More later...