The Reality

First off thanks to all of you who made the effort to find my new blog home.  I've heard so many of you talk about friendships that you lost due to your infertility struggle and I'm experiencing that first hand.  It's a different kind of hurt on top of our most recent disappointment.  But such is life I guess.

So here we are at the point I prayed we would never get to.  CCRM.  It was a comfort to me knowing we had worked so hard and saved enough money to go to what is arguable the best fertility clinic in the country.  And having a a backup plan always makes me feel better.  But now that we are here and it's becoming real I feel paralyzed with fear.  Obviously my thoughts jump to what happens if this doesn't work?  What if CCRM discovers something majorly wrong with me?  What if we can't get the number of eggs we did in the past?  What if none of them are genetically normal?  We saved enough money to cover potentially 2 fresh cycles there.....what if we do one and then for some reason we are encouraged to go with donor eggs or a surrogate.  We definitely don't have enough money for that.  I know I'll drive myself crazy thinking of all of the What If's.  But it's hard to shut it off.

That being said I did find the courage to reach out to CCRM to schedule our ODW (one day workup).  For those of you not familiar with their protocol this is a full day of appointments and testing that is the first major step when becoming a patient at CCRM.  They will perform a hysteroscopy, communicable disease blood test for both of us, a semen analysis for D, the antisperm antibody screening, pelvic ultrasound and doppler study of blood flow through my uterus.  Then we'll have a regroup with Dr. Schoolcraft to review the test results and he'll recommend a treatment plan.  My issue is they want to do this appointment sometime between day 4 and 12 of my cycle.  I'm currently waiting to start my period.  I did my last PIO shot on Wed.  I'm hoping to start my period this week but who knows.  CCRM wants to schedule my ODW for Friday April 3rd which  means I need to start by Sunday.  Obviously it adds a whole layer of complexity when you are trying to book flights, hotels, time off work, etc.  So right now we are waiting (boy does that feel familiar).


For those of you who have are/were CCRM patients I'd love to hear from you!  Advice, thoughts, experiences - are all welcome!