The Press Your Luck IF Plan

The clinic's office called on Thursday offering to move up my appointment from Tuesday the 13th to Friday the 9th. What luck! I didn't have to wait all weekend wondering what we were going to do.

So, now we have a plan. I shall call it the "Press Your Luck IF Plan".

And here we go... Medicated IUI, no baby, no baby, no baby - STOP. (And please God no Whammy!)

Yup, that pretty much sums it up. Three cycles of IUI and if we are not successful we will discontinue this course and go to plan B. Dr. K met with us and we discussed how generally a young healthy couple with no obvious reasons for infertility had a good reason to start with the least invasive, least costly, natural (although I have to disagree with the medical field assessment of "natural") treatment. She explained that considering the years of trying without success, untreated she thought we probably had about a 1-2% chance of conceiving. Unmedicated IUI would bring us up to about 8-9%. I asked her what she thought of me going ahead with clo.mid and she thought that if we were fine with the risks, she was fine with that route. It would bring up our numbers to about 10-12%.

Which brings me to a quick point about advocacy. I have always trusted my health care providers. You tell me I should do XYZ, I will do those without question. I have also been very intimidated about speaking up. I have since learned from my research and greatly due to good resource websites like Mel's, that we are the ones in control here. As much as I love my RE, and so far she's been great, it's still my plan here. She is a highly educated, highly skilled tour guide to our fertility journey. We're the ones who bought the tickets, she's the one that is going to make sure that we follow a plan/schedule and it's her job to make sure that we get through this trip as unscathed as possible. But, ultimately if we want to divert, go down a different path then the one she initially has laid out we have to speak up. And the only way we will know to speak up is to educate ourselves to the terrain.

Okay, you're safe. Soap box put away for now! Perhaps that's fodder for another post.

My second thought is in regards to why Buster is the image at the top of this post. I have a fear of miscarriage. I know what you're thinking..."Who doesn't?" For some reason, I just think that my road is one that will be tested and rocky. Sometime during this Press Your Luck IF plan, I think I'm going to hit that "Whammy". That might seem overly pessimistic. My mother used to tell me at times I could be too pessimistic. I disagreed, I told her I was just being practical. In hindsight, given the situations we were in at the time, I was right... but who's counting.

When I was 15 years old I witnessed my cousin's devastating miscarriage first hand. She's a bit older, she was in college when I was born and I was the flower girl in her wedding. But, she's the closest to me of all my cousins. I'll never forget the experience. She already had three kids and was expecting the 4th. Her house was always full of kids. I always thought it was funny that you never really have just your own children, you always end up doubling kiddos. Cousins, friends, neighbors...this particular week in her house was no different. My parents were in Guatemala. My father had lost his job a few years prior to this and tried to go on his own for a while, but was just not finding steady work. So, my mom's side of the family (who is a naturalized US citizen but born in Guatemala) gave my dad a job. They were down there visiting, but checking about the job, checking into housing and schools. Meanwhile my brother and I stayed at my cousin's house.

My cousin had a regularly scheduled check up appointment with her mid-wife. I think she was around 16 weeks. She asked all the kids, "Who wants to go with her to the mid-wife to hear the baby's heart beat?" All of the kids were super excited to go. Then she said, "Joey is going to come babysit for anyone who wants to stay home." Well, then everybody wanted to stay because they loved that babysitter so much. So then the plan was for just her and I to visit the mid wife. The next thing I remember I was walking into a Victorian style home with wood floors and high ceilings. We went into the room and the mid-wife started the ultrasound. I sat in the corner just watching not realizing the impact that 15 minutes had already passed... I didn't even know anything was wrong until I heard my cousin sniffling. The mid-wife wiped off the gel on the u/s wand and simply said, "I'm so sorry. I can't find the heart beat."

I was absolutely shocked. My cousin and I cried together in the car. I remember thinking that it was no accident that I was the one to accompany her there and the other children were not. I cried that night, tossed and turned and could hardly sleep. I just couldn't understand how this could happen. It was that experience that educated me to the miracle that is every life. Can you believe the odds for you and I to be here?

Within the first year of our marriage I saw 28 families in our neighborhood get pregnant. (Well, not first hand of course!) But that didn't even include announcements at church or work. I looked up the stats on infertility and at the time it was one in nine. Well, I started doing the math, looked around our neighborhood and thought our chances of getting the stork with a hopeless sense of direction were very high.

In the end I sure hope I'm wrong. But, Buster - you'd better know that if you show up in my life with all of this, I'm going to hunt you down and cut you up!