Super-Secret Post
Concerning May, June, and July 2014
I am catching up to the point where I have to pay attention to when I post these such that I keep the 3 month delay I originally intended. I knew that a couple of posts covering longer stretches of time would help catch up and that’s why things were overly-delayed for awhile.
For a short period of time, we were under the impression that the time we forfeited in fertility progress was well-worth it: I’d finish a time-sensitive diploma requirement, we’d get ourselves moved to Ottawa, and we’d be able to hit the ground running at the Ottawa clinic. After all, I had just completed massive amounts of testing in Waterloo and had been an hour from starting IVF when we found out I was pregnant.
Part of that optimism was expressed by scheduling our opening consult with the Ottawa clinic in early May while we were in Ottawa for house hunting. With that under our belt, we figured we’d be able to get IVF rolling in June or July. I was holding off booking any trips anywhere until we knew what was going on, and I was figuring employment could wait until after that, too.
We first met with a fellow (i.e. a doctor in training, although also it happened to be a man) who we really hit it off with and felt really comfortable with. He was really grateful for a summary I had prepared of all the test results I understood well enough to summarize and a breakdown of my detailed cycle info and the hormone levels of the two chemical pregnancies, and I was flattered to have my efforts recognized.
Then we met with our chief physician who went over everything with the fellow and made the determination of our course of treatment.
She found something deviating from the norm that no one had pointed out to me: my maturing-follicle count during my Waterloo work-up was on the low side. To ensure I wasn’t going to prematurely run out of eggs, we needed a special blood test. The good news was that it was one vial drawn any day of my cycle and I didn’t even need an appointment (easy-peasy); the bad news was that, at that exact moment, we had to run to a showing with a rental agent and didn’t have time to do it then, and it could take up to 6 weeks to get the results back (i.e. set us back two entire cycles). (Although good thing we made it to that house showing since it’s the place we ended up renting.)
With the rush of the move and general poor prioritizing I didn’t get to the clinic for the first two weeks we lived in Ottawa. I thought the timing was working out great when I made it to the bloodtest in the last few hours of errands with a rental car, but actually I had just missed the previous shipment of samples and my results wouldn’t be in for 6 weeks, the worst-case wait time. My follow-up was booked for the end of July, so clearly we weren’t making progress until August at the earliest.
Also, later, we would realize that we wouldn’t get to work with the same fellow consistently as we did in Vancouver… as Ottawa is a teaching clinic, we could meet many fellows but we’d be seeing our primary physician as the consistent lead. We get along just fine with her; the only disappointment stems from how astoundingly we jived with our first point of contact there.