On another note, a lot has happened since my last post. For a moment, J and I thought our IVF would have to be put on hold for a while when we discovered the cost for the medications were triple what we had anticipated. However, we then learned about an amazing program that provides 1-month of free meds to fertility patients with no insurance coverage for fertility and who meet certain income guidelines. We applied and were accepted. Not all the meds were free however, but it did proved the Gonal-F and Ovidrel, which helped out greatly! We ended up having to pay only $800 for over $3,000 worth of medications! This program is called the Compassionate Care Program through EMD Serono Fertility Lifelines. I highly recommend looking into this program.
On a less happy note, we got the results back today from J's semen analysis and they were not great. He had 10.8 million sperm (20 is considered "normal") and had 88% motility (this was actually good news since 50-60% is considered "normal".) The big shocker was that out of 100 sperm, only 2 had "normal heads." This is not good news. They want at least half to have normal heads. So, our doctor says we will definitely need to use ICSI (Intro-cytoplasmic Sperm Injection...when a single sperm is directly injected into an egg rather than letting the sperm fertilize the egg on it's own.) This will increase our chances of success.
I wanted to add. I kind of feel okay about the semen analysis not being so great and this is why... it provides a reason why the IUI's & trying naturally for so long have all failed. It also means, that it's not likely that implantation is the problem. It's a solve-able problem.
ReplyDeleteIt is a very solve-able problem! We did ICSI and it worked wonderfully!!! We have our two little blessings now!!!
ReplyDeleteThanks Rebecca! Do you remember how many eggs were ICSI'd and how many embryos were transferred back??
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