OHSU Appointment Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning at 8a.m. is our first appointment with Dr. Phillip Patton at Oregon Health Sciences University.  I am excited (again!) and nervous (again!), but mostly excited.  :)  Basically, I think we will hear the same things we did from Dr. Hesla . . . that IVF with ICSI is the way to go for us, and I am ready for that.  One thing that will be different this time around is that we will have a 30 minute financial consult after our hour-long appointment.  ORM didn't offer anything to try to help make treatments affordable except for their "Our Promise" plan which we don't qualify for (because my Day 10 FSH level, while still normal, is "too high").  But that's okay.  I think maybe we were meant to work with the folks at OHSU anyway--maybe they will have a financing option that is just right for us.

I didn't blog last week about how things ended with ORM, but in case you are wondering, I did call last Wednesday and talk to the office manager there.  I was very polite, yet still managed to explain just how and why we feel the way we do.  Dr. Hesla called me that evening as I was leaving work.  He didn't mention anything that I had spoken with the office manager about, but instead said he just wanted to give me the final results of the Clomiphene Challenge test and his recommendation for us.  Not surprisingly, he said that we are very good candidates for IVF, since I still have a good number of eggs.  And he mentioned again that we could always try an insemination although he guessed our chances of conceiving would be about 4%. 

I told him that I thought he had said IVF was the way we should go from the beginning and he said that some women choose to do an insemination when they take the Clomiphene Challenge test, since they are already taking a fertility drug and the chances of conception are slightly higher than normal.  He added that we could have used it to check the number and quality of Michael's sperm and seemed to think that this had been an option from the start despite the fact that neither Michael nor I remember that being discussed during our initial consult.  No matter.  We are moving onward and upward. 

My hope for this appointment with Dr. Patton is simply that Michael and I both like him and feel comfortable with him, and that he is genuinely interested in our specific case and communicates clearly about the treatment plan he thinks is best.