Could be the beginning of a joke about infertility, but no, that was just my thursday (CD10).

The day started with morning monitoring at Dr. K’s office in White Plains. According to the stim sheet I’m looking at my overachieving right ovary 3 follies at 10, and one at 13,15 and 17. My slacker left ovary had four at 10 and one at 15. My lining was at a respectable 10 so I was feeling quite pleased with myself until the doc filling in for the vacationing dr. K told me that I wasn’t quite ready to trigger but they would need to see me back the following day.

Normally not a huge deal, other than that I’m used to only having monitoring every other day but with Dr. K away they were closing the office the next day and I’d have to go into NYC for monitoring and somehow get back to work in rockland county all before 9am.  As it turns out it wasn’t so bad minus the getting up at the crack of dawn part.  But I’m getting ahead of myself, we’re still on Thursday..

I go right from Dr. K’s office to my first appointment with Dr. Thornton in the Westchester office of Columbia’s Center for Women’s Reproductive Care (CCWR).  To make a long story short I’m switching insurance from Oxford to Aetna so that IVF will be covered up to three cycles so I need a new RE as of Jan 1.  I wanted to get my first patient appointment out of the way so that if I’m mid cycle on Jan 1, I can go right in for treatment.

After getting lost for about 20 minutes thanks to my GPS I finally arrived and filled out paperwork for about an hour.  I had a copy of my records from Dr. K that Dr. Thornton was looking over as I filled out forms. As an afterthought, I gave the receptionist my HSG films thinking even though they were normal, he may want to see them.

Good thing I did because the first thing he wanted to talk to me about was the polyp smack dab in the middle and top of my uterus.  Huh? The radiologist told me there was nothing there! In fact the HSG report said no uterine abnormalities found. But sure enough, once Dr. T pointed it out to me, I could see it plain as day.. a weird almost hook shaped gray protuberance that is quite obvious once you know where to look. See for yourself:

Stupid Polyp!

He asked me if I knew it was there and I told him that yes I did, and I thought it could be preventing implantation but Dr. K had told me there were no studies showing that polyps cause infertility. Dr. T said “no studies?” and promptly pulled up two that he had shortcuts to on his  desktop that seem to very strongly suggest that polyps can not only keep you from getting pregnant, but can also cause miscarriage.

He also pointed out that mine was on the top of my uterus which is 90% of the time where the embryos want to implant, making it of further concern.

This sent my head spinning..

What if I’m not infertile at all? Maybe once I get this damned polyp removed I’ll have the same chances as any other 34 year old at getting pregnant!

This is a confounding train of thought because I must decide how aggressive to be after its removed.. do we go back to trying “naturally?” Do I keep doing injectable IUIs, maybe go back to clomid or even proceed to IVF? Or maybe just give myself 3-4 months of trying on our own with accupuncture giving a helping hand.. I really don’t know what the answer to this is.

All I know is that Dr T.  and I decided that next month we will remove the polyp and so I can’t do a stimulated cycle. Unfortunately Jeff will be away for the cycle after that, so if I’m not pregnant as a result of this current IUI, its very unlikely that I will get knocked up any sooner than say February.

This is a very depressing thought.

Dr. T also said he doesn’t really do injectable IUIs. He said if you are already stimming you might as well do IVF. I’m not sure what to think about that.  His nurse also told me that they don’t do PIO (progesterone in oil aka the really painful shot!) shots for their IVF cycles… which basically means that the injections for IVF aren’t really much worse than what I just did this cycle. I wonder if this lack of PIO shots has something to do with CCWRC’s lower success rates compared with Cornell, NYU and even RMA?

I didn’t ask Dr. T about the numbers thing.. I figured I’d wait until my SECOND appointment with him before I go about making him hate me..

He already thinks I’m nuts. At one point when I was questioning him about whether my 9 lining was ok during my clomid round he pulled out a card for my accupuncturist Angela and said “First of all, you should go see her.” I think this was his NOT so subtle way of saying don’t second guess every minute aspect of your treatment and calm the f*ck down. That kind of upset me because hey, lets face it, I’m not anywhere near calming down about this IF stuff, so if that’s going to rub him the wrong way then we are NOT a good match!

Speaking of Angela, thank GOD I had an appointment that same night (yes, three in one day!) to see her.. I came into her office and pretty much just couldn’t stop talking about all my impressions of the days news…I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m nuts too, but she’s much better at hiding it!

I realized thought that she is the only person in my real life that I can talk to about this IF stuff.. all the other people I interact with are on message boards.  I think my appointments with Angela are probably half accupuncture and half therapy, which must be what I need right now.

CD 11 news tomorrow!

Filed under: TTC by ariana