This actually happened to me today.

The very last thing we had to do before completing all our pre-IVF work was contact the Urologist and find out what his plan was for J. We had some conflicting reports so we just wanted everything to be square for scheduling purposes. J has left a message for the Uro and was waiting for a call back.

Side note: J and I bought my Mom a sound bar for her TV for Christmas. We haven't been able to hook it up because we needed an extra cable.

So being the very nice son-in-law that he is- J went up to my Mom's today to install the sound bar. They were just leaving lunch- sitting in the car- when the doctor called. And J talked to him. On Bluetooth speaker phone. With my Mom in the car. So Mom got an ear full about the sperm plans. Ugh.

J calls me at work to tell me the sperm plans. With my mom in the car. Ugh again.

The urologist wants J to do a repeat semen analysis. He's been on the Clo and some other vitamins- CoQ10 and ConceptionXR since September. He responded well to the Clo before so we're hoping it has helped now. He wants him to go see what's goin on with the boys and possibly freeze some sperm as a back up for IVF. The back up will allow us to not have to do any kind of surgical removal on the day of egg retrieval. (Do you hear J cheering in the background about that??) If the sample is good- they freeze. If not- then we'll have the urologist on stand by for egg retrieval day. So then after that- J will go the day before egg retrieval and give a sample and then also potentially the day of. It's a good plan.

So back to the awkward part. J says (still on speaker phone, still with my mom) that he should call them now and he'll just go over to the office and do the sample now. (Um, hi- are you just going to leave my MOM in the waiting room?). I then have to remind him that it's been far too long since he's ::clears throat:: cleared the pipes to provide a sample. While my Mom listened. Awesome.

So much for not telling anyone, huh? Repeat S/A is 1/23.

Where do we go from here?

I love J's Urologist. He has always made things easy to understand. He explains the numbers of the SA in a way that the RE's don't. He's straight forward about what would be the best way for us to have children.  After our WTF appointment with the RE, we decided to go back to the Urologist. Maybe a final effort to figure out if there was anything anything anything we could do to improve the numbers, I guess? The whole thing about donor sperm kept coming up and we wanted to be totally certain there wasn't anything else that could help J's swimmers.

The urologist things we're nuts for thinking about donor sperm. And I'm so thankful for that because while I would have really considered it, it would have been a huge, huge issue for me and in the long run, I'm just not sure if I could have gotten to the point where I would be 1000% comfortable with it. But I digress. He thinks J has plenty of sperm. The problem doesn't really lie with count, but with motility. J doesn't have a lot of sperm, but he REALLY doesn't have a lot of motile sperm. And because of this, we are doing ourselves a disservice by having only one egg to work with. I knew all along that he wasn't really a fan of Natural Cycle IVF, but the idea of no drugs was so appealing and when we got that insurance coverage- we figured we would try it. He did give J Clomid, but said it will really only help with count, not so much motility. He suggested Conception Rx for Motility (the expensive one blahhh) and traditional IVF with ISCI.

He wants J to give a sample the day before retrieval and then again the day of. He said there is a way to "warm" the sperm (WTF that means I have no idea?) that will help them distinguish the good from the bad. If there are no good sperm, they will do an emergency biopsy and take sperm right from the testicle that day.

So where do we go from here. Well I cancelled our Natural Cycle IVF cycle. We are going back to the first RE that we went to. They have significantly better success rates with traditional IVF than the clinic we are going to now. And even though it's kind of like a factory- they are good at what they do. We have a consult set up for October 9th. They will likely make me repeat my HSG and then we're going on vacation for Thanksgiving so that puts us on BCP's for November and cycling in December/January. More freakin waiting. It's like a curse.

This is our original path. So I feel confident. And now with good insurance we have three cycles to deal with. I think if it doesn't work in three cycles, we'll be done. I don't know if I can take much more than that. So we'll see. For now, we wait. Again.

Urologist Update

Ahhhhhhhhh! Just when you think there is a plan- a road map of some sort through all this crap, something else happens and it all goes to shit.

J went to the urologist. He's going back on Clomid. And we're going back to our old RE for a consult. Too much is up in the air to blog about for the moment.

All I know is that this cycle is off. Blah.