Appointment Update

We met with the new fertility doctor about a week ago. My husband and I liked him and he actually trained our old fertility doctor so that makes me more confident in him because she was amazing. He reviewed all of our tests results and he doesn’t seem concerned about my bleeding or the low sperm morphology and said that he’d really consider us to be dealing with unexplained infertility. I’m a little sceptical of that. I know that sperm morphology is sort of hit or miss on if it actually impacts fertility depending on severity and if it impacts functionality of the sperm, but I have a hard time believing that dysfunctional bleeding as severe as mine is not impacting our ability to get pregnant – it’s been 26 failed cycles, so something isn’t working properly. Similar to the old doctor he suspects that my bleeding is either caused by a weak ovulation or a lack of or miscommunication between my ovaries and my uterus, which fits in with why the clomid and progesterone made the bleeding stop.

The doctor didn’t push us right to IVF and said that we could do more medicated IUIs if we wanted, but since we did have 3 failed IUIs he wasn’t sure if any more would actually result in a pregnancy. We did make it clear that we had been planning on moving to IVF when I got the job offer to move so he said that we could start prepping for IVF.

Since it has been so long since we’ve done treatments, we do need to repeat some of the testing and do a few additional tests for IVF. It’s pretty easy for my husband – he just needs the STI panel repeated because there is some sort of health regulation that you have to have the tests done within a year of starting IVF. They also want to do a functional semen analysis to help determine if we need ICSI or not. I didn’t really want to do it, but my husband thought it was a good idea, and he was able to get in within a week of our appointment, so he did it. All of his testing is now done. I have to also repeat the STI panel as well as my immunity testing for hepatitis B, rubella and chickenpox, which I had done yesterday. I also need to repeat my hormone panels, including have my AMH (anti Mullerian hormone, a marker of ovarian reserve) so the doctor has an updated idea of my hormone levels to better plan my cycle medications. I need to have a mock transfer so they know exactly how to place an embryo in my uterus. I did my 7 days post-ovulation progesterone draw yesterday and am now waiting for cycle day 3 for the rest of my hormone bloodwork to be done. Once all this is done we will be able to get on the IVF cycle list, which seems to be a 2-3 month wait to start. I can take femara (an ovulation inducing drug that is supposed to have less side effects than clomid) and progesterone with timed intercourse while we are waiting for IVF if we want to give that a try. I think we will just because it will give us something to do while waiting.