So here I sit on the other side of infertility, finally a mother to a perfect twenty-month old after three fresh cycles of IVF and a handful of IUI's. The time, oh the time, it goes much, much too quickly. People tell you this, but in the haze of newborn nights and breastfeeding and endless diapers, you can't believe it to be true, but it is. It is painfully true and the tiny baby who I thought was never going to fit into his three-month sleepers is now saying oodles of words and has a mouthful of teeth and can operate a stick vacuum.
Earlier this year the husband and I were looking at switching G's daycare. Not because we don't love our current daycare, but they are closed a lot more than we'd like them to be and it's hard when you don't have a back-up childcare provider. I really wanted to move him to the local Jewish community center daycare, which is open more frequently and has a similar program to our current daycare. They do not have infant childcare though so if we left our current provider and had another child we'd have to start all over again getting on the waitlist and infant childcare (twelve months and under) is nearly impossible in the city. Anyway, all this lead us to have a come-to-Jesus meeting on trying to have another baby. Since we never had any embryos make it to freezing we'd have to start all over again. So we made a late February appointment (on our 10th wedding anniversary) with our RE (who we've been patients of for NINE AND A HALF YEARS). Our initial appointment was "hey let's check your AMH/FSH/antral follicles before we make any decisions." On CD 3 in March I got my levels checked and I honestly can't remember my exact numbers but the AMH was down a tiny amount and the FSH was up a tiny amount. My antral follicle count was 13, also down slightly. Dr. Groucho, our RE, told me to not worry about the small drop, he didn't think it was that significant. I'm still worried about the numbers. Anyway, after a lot of hand-wringing we decided to go ahead and try one more time, because what the hell right? We have been given a 30% chance of success. 30%. Ugh. I would never gamble on anything with those kind of odds, yet here we are gambling $16,000 on something with those odds. Oof.
We are currently in the birth control phase of IVF. I take my last pill on the 17th and my baseline ultrasound is on the 21st. I also ordered $5,000 worth of medicine this week. When that happened I almost passed out. I mean I *knew* it was going to be around that much, but still, I just wasn't ready for the sticker shock. Then I started having IVF cold-feet. I do want to have another baby, I would love to have a sibling for G but I am completely terrified we're doing the wrong thing. Before G there was so much desperation and so much of just wanting one, one perfect baby. We got our perfect baby and I had a perfect pregnancy and a perfect labor and delivery (in my mind at least). Now I feel like wanting one more of that is selfish and tempting fate too much. How likely is it that lighting will strike twice? But then again other people who don't have to do IVF to have kids have second kids that are totally fine and I seriously doubt they spend much time worrying about it. So many conflicting emotions too. If it doesn't work (and there's a 70% chance it won't) I'll be really, really sad and I'll probably be really, really mad we wasted $16,000. But I know if we don't try this at all, that in six to seven years we will probably regret that we never tried again.
Back on the IVF train we go...
