Meeting with Dr. Wilcox

I often joke about my infertility by saying that 

"I'm broken" accompanied by a shoulder shrug and a smile, or I say things like, 

"I don't EVER have to take birth control again, woop woop!  No unplanned pregnancies for me!"  

But the truth is, it hurts.  I'm beyond grateful for the technology of IVF which has brought Jared and I our amazing son.. But as we begin planning for our second child, the sting of infertility is ever present.  We have to make decisions that no person ever grows up planning to make and, me being the most indecisive person in the world, I hate it.

We met with Dr. Wilcox last Thursday to discuss our next go at IVF.  We have 6 embryos that have been preserved from the last cycle and I don't want to do the whole IVF cycle again so I've been hoping hard that we'd be able to get 2 more children from what we have.  I went in to the meeting fully expecting to do a frozen embryo transfer, with next to no drugs, and I'd be on my way to having the next Jared or Jessica Jr.  No such luck.  After looking at the quality of embryos and discussing how my last pregnancy went, Dr. Wilcox advised us to do a fresh cycle, complete with genetic testing on all embryos {including our 6 frozen} and do a day 5 transfer.  

Not gonna lie.  I almost cried right there.  No part of me wants to go through all of this again.  But you do what you gotta do for your kids right?  I guess it's time to just grin and bare it again.

I felt torn when the dr. was talking to us about the genetic testing.  The lab reports the gender of the embryo with the test.  My dr. was saying this like it was a great thing that we would get the opportunity to 'pick' the gender of our next child.  Maybe some people would be excited about that, but I feel like it's playing God a little too much.  I want my pregnancies to be as 'normal' as possible, and normal people don't just choose the gender of their next child.  We told the dr. that we didn't want to know or pick the gender and he said it's either us or them.  So instead we've come up with a couple of different options.  1.  See if the lab will screen the results and black out the gender of the embryos.  2.  Number the embryos and draw a number out of a hat.  3. Flip a coin and if it's heads, it's a boy, tails, it's a girl.  Dr. Wilcox said that it has never been requested to have the results from the lab screened before so he'd need to see if they'd be able to do that, but so far I'm liking option 2 the best.  That way, we wouldn't know the genders of any of the embryos, the embryo picked out would be picked by chance, and I would have the dr. tell me the gender if/after the pregnancy test came back positive.

Anyway, since we would like to have 2 or 3 more children, we've decided to take our Dr.'s advice and do another fresh cycle.  I've already started the birth control pills and will start the injections approximately 2 weeks after running my 3rd half marathon on Feb. 2nd.  Over the last couple of years there have been changes in the IVF process so rather than having 3 weeks of injections, it will only be 8 days.  Hallelujah!  If everything goes to plan, we're looking at doing the embryo transfer around March 4th or 5th.  Approximately 10 days after that we'll know if it worked and if it did, we'll have an early December due date.  Fingers crossed!