Review Appointment

So, the 'Review' appointment.

Here I am waiting in the big hospital for my free follow-up and who did I spy rounding the corner, but my old 'Bad News RE' who I refused to see privately.

'Bugger' I specifically waited all this time - because this is the day the 'Best RE In Sydney' is scheduled to see people.

Then my name is called ... by a heavily pregnant female doctor. Right.

'I think I recognise you' she said 'Yeah' I thought, 'you were present in my last retrieval and did my transfer ... that didn't work'.

So getting over the fact that she wasn't 'The Guy', not a guy at all, and not a whiff of a scottish accent, we got on with things.

She noted that normally I saw the other 'BN RE' dude, and apart from my cycle reports, didn't have all my history.

'Yep, well that's because the only solution he has for me is donor eggs, and I didn't need a review with him to hear that again'. (Didn't need to pay him another $200 to hear it either).

'Well that is an obvious next step, and a big one for you to think about'.

So I told her that it was something we had considered and had in fact had a friend that had offered to do that (FYI age 30, 3 kids and finished), but we hadn't followed it up. I didn't speak a word about our International DE option we were pursuing - mainly I think because we have a new RE not connected with this hospital taking care of that.

We went over my protocol, I asked why it had never changed - she did say that the other option was the Antagonist (or Flare) Cycle. It was the one we hadn't tried, and possibly could. I hadn't been put on it before - because I had always had good egg numbers. Boy it sounds like a helluva way to cycle - no synarel though, that has to be a bonus.

I asked her about the 5-day vs 3-day embryo transfer - and basically that's not something they budge on - unless you have very few eggs. They strongly believe in the 5-day transfer, even if you lose all but 2 embryos, they see that the others didn't have good egg energy and wouldn't have stuck. So rather than freezing them and then transferring bodgy embryos, you would have a better chance on another cycle. It speeds up the process and weeds out the weak from the strong (my words).

'But' she said 'if you do want to keep cycling you should have an end in mind, I mean you could cycle another 2 or 3 times if you wanted, but shouldn't be thinking of cycling for say another 6 times'.

'Not on your life'.

Interesting I thought, 'BN RE' wasn't even offering that.

I let her know that originally we only ever thought we'd cycle 6 times, but after our last (fifth), we thought we'd call it a day. I also let her know that we were looking into adoption.

I then asked her about what would happen if we did decide to take our friend up on her offer of eggs - could we do that through this clinic? (The Fertility Unit is run by the big private clinic - but is set up at the public hospital = a quarter of the price). We have cycled there in the past as private patients - all that meant was that we didn't have to go on a waiting list - and we paid abit more money.

What she had to say shocked me. We would first have to go through counselling - long winded process maybe 3 months. Then our donor would cycle, they would retrieve and fertilise her eggs, and all embryos would then be frozen FOR SIX MONTHS before they would be transferred! Apparently this is adhering to the very strict health guidelines - something to do with an infections policy. She added that this was the practise here - being a public facility - but that private practise might not necessarily follow those guidelines (read: DO NOT).

Soooo, if we were interested in doing more cycles with my eggs, while we waited through our donor/adoption stuff that would not be a problem at all. We could start next cycle.

'Ummm I was expecting to see the BREIS' I said to her as I was leaving - 'well I was here so I just took some of the files'.

Right. Life is all about chance isn't it?

So I relay everything that night to Mr. S and he was actually very annoyed about it all. Not often he gets that way.

Mainly he was fired up over their stupid DE policy - 'obviously they're just not even interested in helping people with this'. He thought it was horrible I had to see a pregnant doctor 'Did she see the irony, being counselled about Infertility by a pregnant doctor?'. Well for me it's an automatic response - pregnant woman = ignore it. Horrible isn't it? He also thought I should have told them about our o/s stuff. I told him I just wasn't interested in them knowing everything.

At this point, even though it's great that we've been offered this option to cycle again and again (and using tax payers money), I just don't know if we're interested. Could I bear to go through it again?

Nothing is going to change the quality of my eggs.

I think she offered because even though I'm only in the 10% chance bracket due to age - our morphology issues give us only a 1-2% chance a month naturally. The ol 'problems with both of us' dilemma.

Overall I was happy with how things went. We haven't had the door closed on us, and we now know that if we pursue local DE, we will have to go private.

BTW I'm Golden - this is my 50th post, maybe I can get those big J.Lo gold hoops now!