Denver Recap – CC.RM

Here’s a crazy rundown of our time in Denver thus far. It’s a little long-winded, but I want it written down for posterity and shit. 🙂

Friday afternoon – drive up to Denver. 350 miles later, arrive at our friend L’s house in the DTC where we set up camp for the next four days. Have an awesome dinner at the Elephant Bar and go home early to get some sleep. Have I mentioned that I love sushi?

Saturday morning – go in for our CD3 blood work. We waited about 5 minutes to get called back, were in the back room for about 90 seconds, the blood draw took about 20 seconds, and she handed us a bill for $500. Charlie asked if she had any lube. Ouch. To think that was the cheap part…

Saturday late morning – briefly go shopping at the Park Mea.dows mall. To those who don’t know me IRL, this is HELL for me (even thought it’s a great mall). My husband is the shopper, not me. On the upside, I got some new Vickis (VS) workout gear and got to speak French with the French lady at the Lancome counter (always a highlight). Still, I’m itching to get as far from the whole shopping thing as soon as possible. It stresses me out.

Saturday afternoon – see the new Jen Aniston movie Just Go with It. Jen is my husband’s allowed celebrity “free card,” so basically anything with her in it we have to see. It’s actually pretty damn funny and cute. Gotta love Adam Sandler.

Saturday late afternoon – I get naked in the front seat on I-25 (changing into my yoga gear you sickos…though yes, I’m sure some passing cars got a free show) and L drops me off at the class with 2 minutes to spare. My old roommate lives in Denver now and is a hot yoga freak (I say that in the kindest way). She’s 34 and in the best shape of her life thanks to yoga, so she’s totally getting me hooked on the whole thing. We spend an awesome 60 minutes sweating our asses off in a class that will make me sore for days.

Saturday evening – run back to L’s house – shower and get ready. Head back to yoga friend’s house (A) for pre-party and then to a bar for an “anti-Vday party” at Dough.erty’s. Her friend jokes that he brought condoms b/c he thought it was in reference to venereal diseases. I just about choke on my beer I laugh so hard. 🙂

We all proceed to get rocked thanks to A’s friend being the bartender (C on whiskey, me on tequila). At 3am we forget about the 2-5 day required abstinence period for the SA. Um, oops.

Sunday morning – I freak out that OMFG we’ve ruined everything. Talk to the emergency nurse on call, move the SA back by 5 hours (though we find out Monday that they can’t do that so it’s moved back to 8am). The required 48-120 hr abstinence time is now 30 hours for us. UGH. Our bad. You know how embarrassing it is explaining to multiple nurses and your RE that you screwed up and had sex? I mean, for goodness sakes, we know it’s not going to get us KU – what were we thinking? Funny how as IFers we miss those days of spontaneous fun sex… and we had to go do it and regret it.

***OOOH – literally as I finished this sentence we got the SA results – all good. 120 million count… not sure on the motility/morphology b/c C answered the call, but “all good” was what I was told by him, so that’s great!

The rest of Sunday we spent nursing our hangovers before meeting up with Natalie and her husband for dinner. So fun to meet another IF blogger friend!

Monday…the long day. We started off with the SA & Baseline Ultrasound. All good there! Indicators of PCOS, but not the hugest deal in the world. After killing three hours, we head back for the rest of our consults and blood work.

*Dr. Sur.rey is awesome. We had a whopping 20 minutes with him, but he is great. Very honest and straightforward. Assuming that the HSG results are good tomorrow, if we do an IUI, we can do the monitoring & IUI close to home with very comparable results – it’s only if we move on to IVF that it’s imperative we have the procedure done at CC.RM. He sets up the protocol we follow, but it’s not necessary to drive all the way to Denver if we don’t want to. Also, we were worried about doing the IUI but C being in ND for work when I ovulate, and he wasn’t concerned about that at all. Said we can use a frozen sample no prob (though that will cost us an additional $700 and another mandatory trip to Denver *sigh*). At least it’s an option.

He also gave us the results he had so far. Glucose test – passed with flying colors. CD3 work: LH: 10.9 (fine) FSH: 8.5 (fine – they want under 10) E2: 53 (normal <50 – typical to be higher with PCOS). Waiting on AMH results. He said it was great news that everything was pretty much normal so far – makes it easier going forward!

*Mary (the genetic person) was great as well. She was actually familiar with the little town we live in so we had a great little convo about that, PLUS she didn’t charge us for the consult ($150 savings). Awesome. We waived our right to genetic testing for the hereditary spherocytosis (which my Mom has), and later after talking to the nurses, waived our right to testing for CF, Fragile X, and SMA.

*Our nurse, Helen, then went over a gazillion paperwork things with us. Lots of disclosures and waivers and such. Dr. S is going to want us on low dose Clomid + menopur for the IUI… apparently it’s $75/vial though mail-order pharmacies around here. I found it on Best Price Pharmacy for $46/vial…. and through IVF Meds for $39/vial. Does anyone have experience with either of these pharmacies? We’ll probably need 10 vials according to the nurse, so that’s a few hundred dollars of savings!

We then did the final blood work (not including the HSG tomorrow morning), and by Thursday all results should be back, so on Friday we’ll do another phone final workup with Dr. Surrey to finalize our plans.

That being said, we have some big decisions to make.
(1) Go forward with the IUI this next cycle (March) and take our chances with C being here during O (slim to none).
(2) Go forward with IUI this next cycle (March) and pay the $700 to have a frozen sample at CC.RM available for us to use just in case ($700 cost + another trip to Denver… about $100 in gas + 12 hrs driving). Dr. Surrey said that you only lose a percentage point or two of effectiveness by using a frozen sample instead of fresh. I forgot to ask him what those percentages actually are.
(3) Start prometrium again in the next day or two to start AF soon… that would hopefully mean C is around for my O time next cycle. This makes me worried about doing 2 short cycles in a row though.
(4) Wait until C is done working in ND (though we have no idea when this will be).

As a final cap off for the day, after leaving CC.RM today, we picked up my antibiotic prescription (for the HSG tomorrow) at Target and headed to Champps to have a late lunch about 2pm. I took the first pill just after lunch before driving us home, and C was not happy since I was the driver. He said to to wait b/c the possible side effects include loss of appetite, nausea, sensitivity to sunlight, and vomiting, and he just knew that if I took the pill, pretty soon I’d be “sunburned and vomiting.” I laughed him off and swallowed it…and then two minutes from home, I burped…and tasted the half swallowed pill…and almost vomited while driving. I hate it when he’s right.