Wednesday, March 31, 2021

The Road to Baby #3: Choosing a new Clinic

I’m going to try and post some entries on my TTC journey to have my daughter. Since I left off mid-trying. When I was reading blogs, I always wondered what happened when the blogger didn’t blog through the entire process. 

Trying for my daughter was emotional. I was running into fertility issues and I was running into a financial barrier. So not only was time running out - but my money was running out as well. It was super hard for me to consider that I may not be able to add another baby to my family... and it really put me in a bad place mentally. 

I was with my original RE for 2 years to have my son. I loved the office and my RE. I didn’t want to consider leaving... but they were super expensive. They also didn’t really do IVF cycles outside of “typical” ones. Nothing creative. So I went in search and consulted with two more clinics. 

Consult #1

The first one is super popular in my area and super cheap... I was going to go with them, but... very unorganized. They screwed up simple blood work. They also wanted me to put a down payment down on my cycle... yet, they couldn’t get my insurance processing correctly. I had such a bad experience with them from the start, that I knew I couldn’t cycle with them. It would be too stressful that they’d screw something up. The other thing is, they would have done the exact same protocol as my current RE. But they were cheaper, most affordable in the area. 

Consult #2

Strangely enough, my RE recommended this fertility clinic!! I trust and love my RE, so I went into the appointment hopeful. This new RE is a bit of a scientist and he runs numerous clinical trials. He specializes in advanced maternal age (AMA) and diminished ovarian reserve (DOR) - both which matched my challenges. He also had a lot of extra tests that the other two REs never suggested and he had a few different protocols that were successful for AMA/DOR. The cost was in between my RE and consult #2 clinic. But... I felt my best chance to have a baby was with this RE. A funny comment from this new RE after he did an ultrasound: “your uterus is large enough for twins.” I had no comment to that. Lol. 

Financially, I only could afford one more IVF retrieval... at this point I was considering “what if it doesn’t work?” I had started seriously looking into donor embryo as my next steps if my last cycle didn’t work. I had some concerns about using donor embryo. The major one is that it was “closed” and absolutely no contact with the donors. Which I thought would be difficult considering our family dynamics and being open about birth stories - birth family (for B) and donor families (for L). 

At this point in the process, I had a plan and a little more money to keep trying IVF with my own eggs. 

No comments:

Post a Comment