Answers to all those burning ?'s....

Many people have called or emailed me asking all sorts of questions concerning our experience with fertility treatment. I decided to post the answers on here...hopefully this won't get too long!

After trying to get pregnant on our own for a year, we went to the St. Vincent's fertility clinic. They tested us and the only thing they found "wrong" was that I wasn't ovulating. So, they gave me some fertility pills called Clomid. It really didn't help me ovulate and after 4 months of taking Clomid I was ready to move on to something else. Because St. Vincent's policy is to use the least aggressive meds as possible, I decided to change clinics.

That's when I called someone who I knew used a different clinic. I asked her a million questions and sent her a million emails (thanks again "N" for putting up with my nagging). We decided to use the ART Program at Brookwood hospital.
I can't say enough good things about this place. We used Dr. Houserman and she is awesome. But I saw all four Dr.'s while going there, and they are all wonderful in my opinion.

Dr. H started me on Follistim injections. Dal gave me a series of shots for one week in hopes that my ovaries would produce several follicles (follicles are like eggs that your ovaries release during ovulation). Well it worked and I released 4 follicles! The only thing I could think about was that 4 follicles could turn into 4 babies!! Yikes! But we didn't get pregnant on that cycle.

The next month I had procedure done to see if both of my tubes were open (which they were!). So, we did another round of the injections which resulted in a "I'm sorry but your pregnancy test came back negative" phone call.

Then it came time for me to have surgery to see if I had endometriosis. The surgery was quick and I had no endo at all!!! Soooo, we were back on the baby train. We stuck with the injections, since they were working in the sense that I was ovulating. Result: another "I'm sorry" phone call. Now, were classified as "unexplained infertility".

By this time, we were emotionally and physically drained. I was like a zombie by this point and was convinced that it just wasn't going to happen for us. After all, it had been over a year since we first started going through treatment.

Reluctantly, we decided to move onto IVF (In Vitro Fertilization). We had been putting this off because it's pretty invasive and VERY expensive. We hated to spend $12,000 on this procedure but knew that if it got us a baby, it would be worth it. Our appointment with our Dr. was a little over a month out and we just had to wait now.

The day after I made that appointment, our Dr. called and suggested that we do one more round of injections before doing IVF...this time though, she wanted to increase our dosage by a lot! We agreed to doing one more round....after all, what could it hurt right!?!? It's a good thing we did, because it worked!!! I released 6 follicles, and thankfully only one implanted!!!

You know the rest of the story and how thankful we are!