eleventh hour

I had an LH surge yesterday. CD22. So, after a great deal of mad scrambling to get my stepkids taken care of (HUGE props to my future SIL), we actually made it to the appointment 1.5 hours away at 7:30 this morning.

The procedure itself went well. The swimmies are swimming. And so we hope.

But what with it being a Sunday and nobody being in the entire building besides us and the nurse, we had a good long time to chat through our situation.

J's number of moving swimmers today was at 2.5 million. They want, at minimum, 5 million. But all you need, really, is 1 to make it. So not impossible, but not good.

But then we started talking about "the next step". Basically, you can be on the kind of meds I've been on (Clomid and Femara) for 12 ovulatory cycles safely. After that, they start to worry about long term damage to the ovaries. This was our eleventh cycle. We have one more left after this.

Then, we'd be looking at superovulation meds, which operate directly on the ovaries and essentially guarantee ovulation and known timing of ovulation. It takes the body out of nature's hands and puts it in the doc's. We'd then pair it with the same IUI method we've been using. You can do this indefinitely without any known side effects. Aside from the $2000/month that it would cost, the main problem is that it won't help if there are problems on the daddy's side.

There are problems. First, there's the overall number of motile sperm. That's way low. But we also learned today that morphology is a major problem. As in, only 3% of the motile sperm are properly shaped. So, we have 3% of half the ideal number for a successful IUI. What's that? Someone else do the math and tell me. What's 3% of 50%?

With male problems like that, IVF is the only viable option, short of just sort of winging it and hoping for the best. First, that costs about $10,000 at the outset (can that possibly be right?!?), plus another 2 grand for every "frozen" implantation thereafter. Second, what if we end up with, say, 8 viable embryos?

All I can say today is that I'm aching. There is a very real chance that next month is the last chance.

And all I'm going to say right now is "please".