the beginning of our ivf journey

After long contemplation whether or not to start a blog and after reading and being inspired by others' blogs, I decided that I wanted to document and share our journey to have a baby to be able to remember everything, for our children to read, and to inspire others who may be going through the same thing. It's a big deal for us to put ourselves out there on the internet like this, but if it means being able to share and inspire others, we are willing to do it! So here goes....

So why in vitro fertilization?

If you aren't close with Larry and I you are probably thinking, "they're young and healthy and haven't been trying to conceive for long, so why IVF??" Well, I've known that I wouldn't be able to conceive naturally with Larry pretty much since I met him. Larry has cystic fibrosis (CF). 99% of males with CF have CAVD (congenital absence of the vas deferens). To put it in simple terms (like I need- hellooo business major), he is missing the tube that lets the fertile sperm out. Or you could say that he was born with a natural vasectomy.

We've both know that we didn't want to wait too long for a baby, so we started to pray for one as soon as we were married. We want God's hand and His plan to be in all of this. We prayed that God would give us His child to raise and dedicate back to Him.

The start: 

Larry found out that his insurance with Cigna covered 80% of infertility treatment... 80%!! We're both on our own health insurance policies with our jobs since it's cheaper that way so a question that we didn't know was, does this go on his insurance or mine? He is the infertile one, not me, so wouldn't that go on his? Nope, turns out because I am the fertility patient, it goes on my insurance.  His procedure will go on his. Luckily, I called my insurance company and they also cover 80% of fertility treatments! Most insurances don't cover fertility AT ALL, and BOTH of ours cover almost all of it! If that wasn't a blessing, I don't know what is! God is so good.

So for a while, we didn't think that we would have to actually undergo the entire IVF process. We thought why couldn't they just do his procedure to get his sperm out and then stick it into me?? We found out the answer at our first fertility consultation.

Larry's mom recommended the fertility doctor in Baton Rouge, so we made an appointment with him. It seemed like it took forever to get here too. I was SO anxious to find out the process we would need to take to bring a baby into the world. I thought that the appointment would be an overwhelming amount of information that I wouldn't understand, so I did a little bit of research, and I brought a binder and had a few questions written down in it. 

Our 1st fertility consult:

When the day was finally here for our appointment, we were sooo excited. The appointment wasn't at all overwhelming like I thought. We learned that we would have to do a process of IVF called ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection). ICSI is where they inject a single sperm into each egg. The process we were hoping for is called IUI (intrauterine insemination). Pretty much a procedure where they'd place Larry's sperm into my uterus to fertilize on it's own. We learned that we couldn't do the IUI because the sperm where they get them out at aren't mature enough so they aren't good swimmers. So, they might would never make it all the way through on their own. The procedure that Larry will have to do is called MESA/TESE. 

One of the biggest questions I had was how long was this going to take. The doctor said the process only took 2 months. 1 month of me being on birth control, 10 days of injections, the egg retrieval, then the 5 day embryo transfer. The doctor recommended that I get tested to see if I am a carrier of the CF gene and we sit down with a geneticist before we start anything yet.