28 May, 2016

What's Next? IVF?

Over the past couple of days, my husband and I learned some details about our situation that have been calming to me.
On Thursday, we had an appointment with our reproductive endocrinologist. I was slightly irritated when a nurse called to say that we were not going to go through a fourth IUI yet and that the doctor wanted to talk to us. The only reason why I felt that emotion is because the husband and I are headed to the British Isles in slightly more than a week. We will be in a different country for the next cycle and I didn't want to waste two cycles in a row.
It was late in the afternoon. I had just completed my second to last day of school and was exhausted. We are down to one car for the next couple of weeks so my husband picked me up and we drove to the office. After waiting a short period of time, we were ushered back to chat.
We had our list of questions and she had her points of interest to bring up. In all, we were with her for an hour. The most important parts that we discussed had to do with my husband's sperm and my possible condition once I get pregnant.
I have anti-cardio lipin something or other. I'm taking a small blood thinner these days and I'll have to increase the intensity of the blood thinner when I get pregnant. The blood thinners I thought were pills are actually injections and the time frame to take the blood thinner I thought would only be one trimester is actually the entire duration of the pregnancy. Goodie. Every pregnancy.
The more important part, the reason we struggle getting pregnant naturally has to do with the sperm. In January, we deposited four sperm samples to our doctor. They did analyses on all of them, but only checked the sperm morphology with one sample. The percentage of sperm with a normal morphology (sperm shape)? 0%. That explains why the washed sperm for our IUIs were so few in number. It also explains why we can't get pregnant.
We retried the sperm analysis yesterday. Number of normal shaped sperm? 1%. If you also take into consideration the motility and sperm count, that makes it around a million that are motile and shaped normally.
I feel better now that we know why we are struggling getting pregnant, and still frustrated to know it's almost impossible to fix. Sperm morphology is affected by genetics and toxins. Not much to change there.
Next step? We're going to chat with a financial consultant about IVF costs. The doctor is extremely positive about my chances for the procedure.
At the beginning of my next cycle, I'll start on IVF drugs and we'll go from there.

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