The Consultation

So the big day is here. I wake up thinking it's Christmas morning and Santa is coming at 1:00 and he is bringing babies!!! Well, at least the plan to get them. Just have to get through the morning. Ok, check. Now it's 11:30. Choke down a salad. Gulp, I am getting nervous. And nauseated. I race home to get Pete.
We enter The Kirkiln Clinic. Picture a huge, 6 story building with an atrium in the middle. There are clinics everywhere, with their waiting areas separated only by the chairs facing a slightly different direction, perhaps towards their respective reception desks. They are nice enough to put us infertiles down a hallway tucked in a corner. Even the chairs face away from the lost patients, looking for their doctors and late for their appointments. We sign in and sit down. There is a young couple there, as well as a hispanic couple. An attractive lady that looks 40-ish stands by the window making calls. A nurse walks up and asks our last name. She is looking for the man who "is having problems in my happy room". Pete then informs me this is also where the "jerk-off lab" is located. Poor guy.
We are called back. We sit in a room. We wait. A resident comes in, very nice, and asks questions about our history. I show her my Fertility Friend BBT charts. She is impressed with my organization. She leaves. We wait. I feel light headed and nauseated. Pete trys to read to me interesting tidbits out of some mundane magazine but I can't hear him. I try to read an article myself. I'm sure those words mean something, the way they are positioned next to each other but I can't decipher them or their meaning. I can only watch as the seconds tick by slowly, painfully.
30 minutes later, Dr. McLaren comes in. She's from Pennsylvania, so no southern graciousness here. She's very serious but she is nice. And empathetic. She talks to me first and investigates my long, irregular cycles. She is going to test me for PCOS. She wants to inject dye into my uterus and into my tubes to make sure they aren't blocked. Swell. She asks Pete if he has ever fathered a child. He hesitates half a second before saying "no" so I know he was contemplating making a joke but then thought better. She then drops the bomb. The reason why we are here. She gives us "our options", which are as follows:
1. IUI. I go on Clomid and they squirt the swimmers, squeaky clean from a bath, into my uterus and pray one of them finds an egg. I get to monitor myself with my temperatures and OPKs. It's cheap; only $300-500 bucks. With Pete's numbers, the 5-10% chance of knocking me up is slim.
2. IVF. Way more monitoring and a "minor" surgical procedure to suck out my eggs. 45% chance of working. And shots. Lots of shots. But much cheaper than we thought. They say they are the cheapest in the southeast. Only $7-9K, not including meds.
I am trying to ask questions, as is Pete. My questions aren't very organized and I am asking them as they occur to me. Dr. McLaren is nice and I can tell she really wants to knock me up.
We decide to think about it, although we think we will try IUI at least once, to say we tried it. If that fails, we will do IVF. We stand and I am weak. I have a headache. I slowly navigate my way out of the room. I see all the "success stories", aka the walls of baby pictures. I quickly scan them and check out the baby announcement competition. I have my work cut out for me.
I walk to the front and they announce, rather loudly, for me to call them when I get my period. There is blood work to be drawn 3 days after it comes. I get the IVF price sheet and drop off my co-pay. My cheap-ass insurance company is so nice to pay for this first visit.
We stagger out to the parking deck. Pete says he feels good about it and I do too, although I was too overwhelmed to know it at the time. We get in the car and head where, you ask? To the f-ing DMV. My tags are expired and I need to get them renewed. What a day, huh??
We survive the DMV and head to Whole Foods. It's becoming a ritual for us to come here when important fertility milestones occur.
This was surely one of them, and I needed a drink. Maybe two.