Kingston ACU
Kingston Hospital, London
I was excited but a little nervous while we were waiting for our first IVF consultation at the same hospital I'd been treated at a number of times this year already. The clinic was running late and we had a long wait before we were called into the appointment, which didn't help the with the feeling of imbalance. I couldn't help but look at the other couples in the waiting room, I suddenly wanted to know all their stories. As you can imagine, the demographic was fairly predictable - couples in their late 30's to early 40's.
During the consultation with the Senior Fertility Specialist, Miss Despina Mavridou, we had a baseline scan, which is an internal ultrasound to determine my antral follicle count (AFC). The scan showed a very small number of follicles, two on each ovary to be precise, and my left ovary was tucked high up behind my uterus with little mobility. She discussed that it could potentially be difficult to access at egg collection. I started to feel like we were already fighting a losing battle and we hadn't even started the treatment yet - endometriosis has a lot to answer for! Due to the low AFC and previous blood test results detecting low AMH and elevated FSH levels (a good indication of a woman's ovarian reserve), they decided to put me on the very maximum dose of stimulation drugs. We then went through a number of things in detail, including the reasons treatment might fail, operative risks, side effects and the predicted percentage of success (20%), which I thought was quite high, all things considered.
I'd already started to feel very overwhelmed with information to process but this was nothing compared to how I felt after the second part of our appointment. After a further short wait we were ushered into another room to see lovely nurse Laura MacGreggor to go through a phone book worth of HFEA consent forms that we had to sign and date. This was in fact a contract between the two of us and the clinic outlining all kinds of morbid but necessary scenarios such as:
Do you consent to embryos created before your death being transferred to your partner after your death, and to being registered as the legal parent of any child born from your partner’s treatment after your death (ie, posthumous birth registration)?
We then went through our IVF protocol, highlighting key dates over the next three months. I was frantically trying to scribble everything down as I was so concerned I might mess things up if I had forgotten a vital piece of information (my short-term memory is non-existent). Key things I managed to scrawl on the back of the appointment letter were:
- Order the IVF medication from Boots
- Have blood tests (HIV, Hepatitis B & C)
- Jon to provide (yet another) sperm sample
- Ring clinic to book a trial embryo transfer (due to previous womb history)
- Start taking a birth control pill (they know I'm trying to get preggers right?)
- Start sniffing another drug to turn off my ovaries (see above)
- Phone in to book 1st scan (down regulation)
- Start injecting stimulation drugs
- Egg collection under sedation (preferably knocked out)
Laura then explained that the real embryo transfer would be at a different site at King's College Hospital in Denmark Hill. This means that within minutes of my egg collection, Jon will be handed a medical transportation box (fridge) containing my lovely eggs and he'll have to hotfoot it over to King's on the train where he'll then do his his part of the bargain. The following day, we'll hopefully get a call telling us the magic has happened and we have some beautiful little embryos in a petri dish.
Holy moly.
Guy's Hospital, London
As if my mind wasn't frazzled enough after our consultation, I decided to go to my first ever Endometriosis UK support meeting that evening at Guy's Hospital. I'd joined the London facebook group a few months previous and I'd already gained a lot of information but I wanted to meet ladies in the same position I now found myself in. Jon came with me for moral support as I was feeling very anxious about the session. I'm naturally very shy, especially in situations where I'd be meeting someone for the first time, so this was completely out of my comfort zone. Not one new person, but a whole room of new ladies all with one shared condition.
It turns out I had more than one thing in common with a couple of the ladies there that evening and towards the end of the discussion, a question about infertility and IVF was presented. At the end of the evening I got talking to Tijen and Kelda, both of whom were about to start the IVF process, we swapped email addresses to keep in contact over the next few months. I was aware I was talking really intensely as I blurted out my story to them, I'd had so much information to process that day, I was feeling extremely vulnerable and overwhelmed. On the way home, I had a chance to contemplate everything and I felt happy I had two people I could now talk to.
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