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Sex, Doctor style
Friday ended up being a reflection on how the universe enjoys laughing at me. My wife suffers from anxiety. Well it seems the HCG shot put her anxiety at defcon 2. The medication she takes to help her anxiety, she has had to ween off of before this procedure. As an alternative we are sending her to acupuncture, which is helping, but my insurance won’t cover it. The additional cost in turn is causing more anxiety. Then her coworker, out of the blue, files for FMLA next week making her shop short a person when we need flexibility for the embryo transfer. Which is adding more stress. The good news is this week my company is finally giving out our yearly raises. I sure could use a raise to help pay for these expenses my company’s insurance won’t cover, but I make just enough to qualify for the group the executives feel don’t need a raise. (Not blaming you boss, still sucks though.) Everywhere I turned, a new irony was slapping me in the face.
Eventually we got her anxiety under control and went to bed. Now I made sure to have my alarm set for 5:30, what I forgot to check was I had it set not to trigger on the weekend. It’s a good thing my wife is a morning person. We get on the road for the hour-long drive to the main office at the hospital in the big city. I’m estimating we would be about 45 minutes early. We get to the hospital to find the main garage is closed. Ugh! So we follow the signs to the other end of the hospital where there is another parking garage. I didn’t even know they had a second parking garage. We then walk the half a mile through the hospital without a clue where we are headed. By the time we arrive, the wife is laughing at me for my snippy responses to any friendly staff person who offers assistance, and we are only 15 minutes early.
I got called in to give my contribution and was directed to a different room with, you guessed it, a folding chair in a bathroom.
This one has been around the block. I thought the tear in the front was a nice touch. At least this door had a lock and no assassin overhead cabinets waiting to assault me.
You know what is more uncomfortable than leaving a room where everyone knows you are going to go masturbate? Coming back to the same room when you’re done with the same people 15 minutes later, and then walk over to your wife and sit next to her. I think my face discovered a new shade of red. They call my wife in for her procedure. I do a little tweeting, then bury my head in a book to avoid eye contact with anyone else.
About an hour and a half later they call my name. I eagerly get up wanting to check on my wife and see how she is doing. Instead the nurse directs me to the elevator and tells me I have to haul my ass the half mile to get the car, because they are bringing her down to the lobby. By the time I exit the parking garage, the nurse is wheeling my wife down the street looking for me. I almost didn’t notice them in pursuing my goal of getting to the pickup area.
BUT WE DID IT! They harvested 12 eggs from my wife. We will hear back in a couple of days with results on how many successfully fertilized.
The date is set
My wife hates looking stupid. I hate looking stupid. That means in our pursuit to avoid looking stupid, we end up looking stupid. That’s what happened last Friday when the receptionist told us our primary doctor would be at the beach office today. I thought she was talking about our normal clinic office close to our house. My wife was aware they had 2 more satellite offices, knew it wasn’t our normal location, but thought she was talking about the one closer to us. Since neither of us wanted to question the receptionist about her use of the term “beach office”, we ended up agreeing to the appointment at the office farthest from our house. We didn’t need to see our primary doctor. Other than our consultation visits, we haven’t seen him. Most of our procedures have been performed by our primary nurse, or the guy my wife refers to as Dr Pain. Dr. Pain has his own primary patients, but performs procedures on other patients if you schedule it on the day his rotation is at your chosen facility. He just happened to be the doctor on duty at our clinic both times my wife had the procedures requiring a catheter. Dr. Pain is very nice, but very matter of fact. On Friday he was out the door before I realized he was done.
Even though we had to drive for an hour and a half, this worked out for the best. Our primary doctor has more of an instructor personality. He will go over what he is looking for and the reason behind it, whether you are interested or not. I am interested, so I find him fascinating. He explained how the goal is to have as many follicles between 18mm and 22mm. Those are where the doctors are pretty confident fully mature eggs reside. Right now they are anticipating about 9 follicles in that range on the egg retrieval day. They will extract eggs from smaller follicles as well, but the odds are lower they are mature enough to work once fertilized.
Our primary nurse is back from vacation on Wednesday, so our next visit is at our local clinic on Thursday. The doctor was 99% sure we would be giving the HCG shot Thursday evening for egg retrieval on Saturday. I’ve set up the countdown clock. Trying to stay cautiously optimistic, but my success at that is waning.
IVF male 