So y'all remember how annoyed I was with my RE last month when they didn't return my calls right? Well it's safe to say, I'm annoyed again. Mike went in for his sperm analysis (aka SA) and infectious disease labs (They just check to make sure he doesn't have HIV or Hep B or anything that could effect a potential baby). It was a real pain in the a$$ to get him to the Dr's office because he is now working nights (Yeah, it sucks but that is a whole different post.). Basically when he gets home from work at around 9 am he goes directly to sleep until about 4 or 5 pm.Well wouldn't you know that the only time that they could do his SA was at 11:30. Right smack in the middle of his "sleepy time".

In order for my poor husband to make it to the Dr office that day he had to come home from work, go to sleep for 2 hours, then get up again and go in. All of thise just to go to a Dr's office and do the uncomfortable deed of depositing a "sample" into a sterile plastic cup.  I'm telling you he is a trooper. On a random side note, leave it to my husband to send me a picture of the room before he got started. It was quite a sight to see with a TV and DVD player and HUGE stack of nudey magazines. Let's just say, I'm very happy that he had to handle that part of the process. Birth Control doesn't sound so bad anymore. Anyway...back to what I was saying. So he took his "sample" to the lab and asked about his blood work.

**Due to popular demand, I added a few definitions down at the bottom for some of the random acronyms in this post!**

With IVF #2 slowly quickly approaching (UGH, 4 more months) I have gotten back into doing "baby research". For most people this entails looking at the newest carseats and cribs but for us it means scouring the internet for the newest advances in reproductive technologies. When we got pregnant with London we did IVF with ICSI and AH.  This time I am thinking of throwing PGD into the mix. My RE has not recommended this to us yet but we haven't really discussed next cycle yet either. I had an initial consultation and she added me to the January IVF schedule, but we haven't discuss actual protocol.

The reason I would like to add PGD to this cycle to because of our recurrent miscarriages. We had 3 miscarriages before getting pregnant with London and then we lost his twin at 11 weeks.  I would LOVE to somehow cheat the odds and escape from IVF #2 without another miscarriage.

Here are my reservations about PGD though. I have heard that it can sometimes damage the embryo thus making it stop grow. Even the idea of this breaks my heart. There is nothing I can do if some of the embryos that we create from IVF stop growing.  But to think that WE caused it to stop growing breaks my heart. I know this may sound silly to some because I know we are doing it for the greater good of the healthy embryos but I can't help feel bad for the ones who won't pass. The ones who are never going to get a shot at implanting in the uterus. The ones who will begin and end in a petri dish.

So I have a questions for people who have done PGD.  They don't give me details about the embryos do they? They just get a pass/fail grade right? I have this huge fear that they are going to show me this chart on ET day with the embryo's picture/gender/hair color/birth weight/shoe size/and an age progression photo of when the embryo is 21. (TOTALLY KIDDING) I just fear that I will be given too much info thus making me feel even more guilty about the embryos that did not make it. Basically I just want to make sure they don't tell me gender. While I am aching for a little girl, I do think some things should be left up to chance. I want to use the most healthy embryos regardless of gender. I can't imagine if we chose to not use  "embryo London" based solely on his gender. We would have missed so much. Every baby regardless of gender has a place in our family, we just don't know it yet. When we showed up to our ET the Dr used his medical expertise and chose which little guys were getting put back. Knowing personal information about them (like gender) would have always made me feel guilty for the ones we didn't put back. Does this make sense? I apologize if not, this has sort of become a 'random stream of consciousness' post for me. For that I apologize to you, but just writing all of this down has been very therapeutic for me.

Anyway... I think I am going to talk to my RE about doing PGD during our next IVF cycle. Basically I just want to make sure that we have the healthiest embryos transfered at ET. I want to minimize my time at the Dr's office and away from London. I want to minimize the already difficult emotional times that come with infertility and IVF. I want to have a baby with the least amount of heartache. I want to be fertile and get pregnant when my husband bumps into me in the hallway. Since that is not going to happen PGD might just be our next best option.

**Definitions:
RE:  Reproductive Endocrinologist (Infertility Specialist) 
IVF: Invitro Fertilization
ICSI:  Intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a technique where they take one sperm and inject it directly into the egg. Mainly used when there in a issue with the males sperm. 
AH: Assisted Hatching, used to basically crack the shell of an embryo before it is transfered back. It aids in implantation
PGD: P reimplantation genetic diagnosis, genetic testing to make sure the embryo is chromosomally normal before transferring.
ET: Embryo Transfer. The procedure where they put the embryos back inside of you. 

No doubt that you have heard people ask the $64,000 question "when is the right time to have a baby" and the answer is always, "you'll know when your ready". Unfortunately for couples who are challenged in the fertility department, there are few more factors than just being "ready" that have to be considered. Somewhere out there, some brilliant infertile mathmatician is probably working to developed a fancy IVF readiness formula (Good Will Hunting style). Until then, this is my own personal theory.



 First you have to figure out when is your perfect timing. For me this is usually done by looking through my calendar and finding a random block of 4 weeks just laying around. 4 weeks where I want nothing more then to stab myself with needles, be violated by ultrasound machines, and wake up at crack of dawn to see the dr because it seems that they only do IVF monitoring appointments at like 6 am (as if we haven't already paid enough). For others, it is whenever you can manage to take a few weeks off of work. And for the Army wives, its during the few weeks that your husband is not either in the field, away at a school, or gearing up/ gone for deployment. It is basically just whenever you can find the time to push the pause button on your life,  so you can focus all of your time, effort, emotions, and energy on having a baby.

Your Doctor's timing is almost always different than your own. Either your perfect cycle is already full. Or they want you to put it off for a few months to have more testing, surgeries, longer suppression, or any one of a million other reasons. Getting your timing and your Doctor's timing to line up perfectly is almost impossible. So a compromise is almost always necessary, however it gets even more complicated when you add two more elements into the equation. Two VERY BIG elements.



Now, after going through this very long explanation, I have plugged all of our information into the formula listed above and have come up with ....

Well as some of you more serious blog stalkers (in a good way of course) may have noticed my first appointment with the new RE was supposed to be last Thursday. Unfortunately I had to reschedule because I couldn't find a baby sitter.  I knew finding someone we actually trusted in a new town was going to be hard, but I really underestimated how hard. Well finally after asking every single person I came into contact with...I FOUND A BABYSITTER!

She is an early childhood education senior at a near by college. I really like her, and she reminds me alot of myself a when I was her age, you know...all round awesome!

Our first order of business now that we have a baby sitter is.