Decided on IVF.. with many questions!

SunTan313 · October 2011

I think we have finally come to the decision to do IVF.. We have a consult with the RE on Monday. We only tried one IUI, but with our morphology issues, I just don't have enough faith in IUI's to continue with them.. To me it just makes more sense to use the money we would have spent on 2-3 more IUI's on IVF with ICSI with higher success rates.
I am so nervous about it all.. And have a lot of questions. I am curious about how much IVF will take away from my life. I am excited to start, but nervous about being a teacher and having to miss a lot of work. How much exactly work am I looking to miss for appointments, etc?
Also, I'm curious about the frozen embryos. We are looking into a shared risk program that includes fresh and frozen cycles. If we happen to have success on our first round, and we do have embryos left to freeze, what happens to them? How long can they be kept? Is there a possibility to use them years down the road if we want to try again for a sibling? I am assuming there is an expensive rate to keep them..
Sorry, I am absolutely clueless when it comes to IVF! I am extremely nervous about the cost and everything that goes along with it, but so ready to be pregnant!!
I know we'll know a lot more at our consult, but it's hard not to want to know all of the information now!

I am on cd1 today.. How long does it take to get everything started? Is there a possibility to get everything started this month, or does it take a month or so of preparation? Thanks in advance for your answers

GL to everyone in your journeys!

SunTan313 · October 2011

Sorry for the formatting.. I'm on my phone!

BeachBee · October 2011

Hello! I do not think I can answer many of your questions, but I wanted to tell you I am a teacher too and just found out IVF is my only way to conceive. I understand the need to want to know all of those answers! I am also worried about missing school and needing to leave early or come in late due to appts.

I am doing a shared risk plan and then we pay extra to keep the leftover embryos frozen. The doctor said we will start BCP day 3-5 of my next cycle, which is this month! So, with my RE, we do BCP, then injections, and then I will start the transfer process in Dec. I am still learning all the details, so sorry I was not much help. My shared risk plan will cost around 16,000. Hope I was some help. Good luck to you!

mego36 · October 2011

We're also starting IVF right now. ?I had my CD 2 monitoring yesterday and started birth control for 10 days. ?Today we had our meeting w/ the nurse practitioner.

As far as the frozen embyos go, we were told if this 1st rounds works for us our frozen emryos will be available for future children. ?We signed consent to freeze them for 5 yrs but they said that if need be they will extend that.

Right now I have to go back for monitoring on the 17th and 20th, which will be when I'm finishing my BCP. ?Once I start my stims I'll have to go for daily monitoring. ?Then days off for transfer and retrieval and 2 appts for bloowork after that.?

I'm also a teacher and yesterday I had to take a half day bc I couldn't get in before 10am. ?However, I only made the appt the day before. ?My next appts are at 6:30am so I won't have to take time off. ?They also said that they should be able to do my daily monitoring early.?

I hope that helps. ?Good luck!?

tst1998 · October 2011

Good luck! It is a lot to take in, but once you have an actual plan in place, it becomes much more easy to deal with. I only had one additional monitoring with my IVF cycle than I did with my IUI, and we were able to do all those visits at 7 am. The hard part was setting my schedule for the ER/ET, since you can only estimate when those are going to happen. I only had to take two days off (my RE doesn't require bed rest after ET).

As for frozen embryos, keep in mind that a shared risk cycle will usually only pay for one baby. If you have frozen embryos that you want to use for a sibling down the road, that isn't included. We ended up with 6 embryos this last IVF. We transferred one, which resulted in a chemical pregnancy. We froze the rest of them (6 months of storage was included in our IVF cost). We are going to do a frozen cycle next month. They can be frozen indefinitely as far as I know. Our clinic contracts with a central storage facility in Nevada that charges about $400 per year. You do have to pay shipping costs if you want them for future transfers.

There are quite a few tests (mostly infectious disease testing) that need to be done before IVF, so depending on how much of that you have had done already, you might be able to start right away, or you may need to wait. I ended up on BCPs for about 2 weeks, then Lupron for 2 weeks, and stims for 10 days. The whole cycle took about 6 weeks from CD1 to beta.

Good luck! Hope you get some good information at your consult!

SunTan313 · October 2011

Thank you so much for all of the wonderful info! I have heard about going on BCP's before IVF.. What is the BCP for? GL to each of you! It's a stressful time, but good to be able to hear from others going through it. I don't know anyone IRL going through this

vagueintentionally · October 2011

edited

vagueintentionally · October 2011

edited

bandwife928 · October 2011

I just completed an ivf and missed nine days of school, mostly in half-day increments to make the three hour round-trip to the RE. I missed one full day for ER and two full days for ET. My clinic charges about $100 per month for storage of frosties and they can be frozen indefinitely. Good luck!

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Decided on IVF.. with many questions!

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