Giving Thanks and Taking Control

So this past week I started to take control…birth control that is J It’s really funny to think that the first ‘official’ step in the IVF process is taking birth control. I was super excited to take the first dose since it made everything even more real.  You might be asking yourself why someone who is trying to have a baby is excited about birth control, well here is the answer. Birth control helps to prepare the ovaries for stimulation. The pills decrease the chances of creating cysts that could interfere with the cycle start. They also allow the doctor to control the timing of the cycle.

The clinic that I go to, MCRM (Missouri Center for Reproductive Medicine) has one week every month for IVF egg retrieval and one week for embryo transfer. So all of the ladies that are doing IVF that month need to be, roughly, on the same cycle to be ready that week. I will keep taking the pills until around the first week of May. After that I will start taking the medication to start stimulating my ovaries to produce, hopefully a lot of, eggs for retrieval! 

I do want to take a minute to say how grateful I am for the fertility clinic and their staff. I have been able to ask a million questions and they get back to me in less than an hour. I have been working closely with their financial person, Dena, and my IVF coordinator, Jen F., and they both have had well over 50 e-mails from me in the past few months. I was so impressed with the timeliness of their replies! I am excited to start my journey through IVF with them!

I also want to give a shout out to a Facebook group that some of the ladies who have done/are doing IVF at MCRM have started. It is a private group called MCRM IVF Support Sisters. These ladies have been absolutely amazing. It is a group of around 150 past, present, and future MCRM patients who share their advice, their success, their setbacks, and their support with everyone. I have learned so much about the process from these ladies! I have gotten to follow their journey through infertility and they are sharing in mine. Sometimes it is scary being a part of the group because when IVF doesn’t work for one I get worried that it might not work for me and my heart aches for that person. But then there are those that IVF does work for and I am reminded of the excitement and hope that I have and I get to rejoice with them!

I once again want to thank those who have contributed to our crowdfunding page! We’ve had a good show of family support in the past two weeks! We are almost half way to our goal J And for those of you in the St. Peters/St. Charles, MO area, if you're out and about today (or anytime in April) stop by the Barnes and Noble Cafe in St. Peters off MidRivers and order a drink! My husband is the cafe manager and they are doing a competition in the district to see who can go above plan in drinks by the highest margins for the month of April. The manager of the cafe that wins gets a large cash prize! His store is working their butts off to help us win this prize to go towards our Journey to Baby Kneeland! They have started calling the competition Baby Bonanza! Every drink made by the cafe counts!

PS- I cannot remember if I posted about Gizmo since he got his surgery. We had his surgery a few weeks ago and we got his biopsy back and it was not cancerous yet!! We are super thankful about that! He is working on growing back his hair from the surgery now.