Thursday, June 14, 2012

Antibiotics, nausea, and Oreos

Tuesday was Day 3 of Heather’s cycle, and we celebrated.  She returned from her early-morning blood test with McDonalds, and we snacked and speculated about how many calls it would take to get the results to Nashville.  We welcomed the first of seven days of antibiotics with a hash-brown welcoming committee in our bellies.

Wednesday morning, I started putting on eyeliner and dry heaving at the same time.  Surely not.  So I did some deep breathing, looked back at the magnifying mirror, and vomited.  I recognized it was taking meds on an empty stomach, so I zipped to the kitchen and grabbed the first food I could get my hands on: a vanilla Oreo with red & blue icing.  I went back to the bathroom and subsequently vomited into the sink.  Okay.  Twenty minutes later, I was texting my boss that I’d been in the car but vomited out the window (and, no, not all the way outside the car) and was now in the parking lot of a gas station, waiting for my stomach to calm before hitting the interstate.  I vomited again and got to work half an hour late.  Heather was an hour late, curled up in bed with a combo of cramps and nausea.  We gathered they weren’t kidding about the “with a full meal” warning.

The other thing we did Tuesday was talk to the lady who heads up the Nashville office’s PGD department.  I took detailed notes that are of no real value, since we’ve already chosen to do the procedure and can Google all the business about methodology.  I’m not sure that I would have bothered with the Googling, though, long enough to find out that the sorting of embryos they do in the process could easily mean we have no extra embryos to freeze.  As a general pattern, they say, a woman will have somewhere between 10 and 15 eggs harvested; about 8 of them will be of good quality; and about 6 will fertilize.  That gives you the two you need for implantation, plus some extras.  With PGD, they look through the 6 embryos, and probably discard 4 as abnormal.  Then you get the two healthy ones to implant, and you’re all out.  Nothin’ to freeze.

Once Heather complained to the PGD lady about our difficulty in paying for the procedures—emphatically—we had a call from the finance office.  Heather paid the $8,800 flat fee and I paid $4,275 for PGD.  I called back today and paid $1,450 for ICSI—turns out, ICSI is required for us because we’re using frozen sperm, but not built into the flat fee.  

At lunchtime, I left a message for the nurse in Nashville: Had the AMH results come through?  We'd been told that our doctor would look at it and get back to us with a calendar yesterday.  Call back: nope, it didn't come through.  So I left a message for the records department at Dr. King's office.  Holy mother of god...  Tomorrow is Friday and Day 6.  I am the most well-behaved, conflict-averse person I know (thanks, Mom), but I just want to find someone in that office and freak the fuck out on them.

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