we're switching dr's and moving on to the next step...

We're just back from the dr's office. We started with our midwife who informed us that after reading the ultrasound technicians results/comments from last week, I officially have one of the worst cases of PCOS that the ultrasound tech has ever seen... fabulous! My ovaries are completely lined with cysts, she explained it to us that it looks like "a string of pearls". Hmm... wish they were some pearls I could at least wear!

She then went on to explain that she only deals with mild infertility and that we were past that point now, so we needed to move onto a more specialized doctor. Another Dr. in the same practice deals with infertility so she asked if we were ready to meet with him and discuss our next steps... DUH! Of course I'm ready to discuss our next steps, I'm ready to get this train rolling. So we were lead to another room where we met Dr. O. He was great! Super friendly, very sympathetic, super knowledgeable and overall pleasant.

He looked through my ever growing file, and we talked about our next steps. He asked us if we were against doing injections. If you know me well, you know that I'm a huge needle phobe, in fact I just recently got my blood drawn along for the first time ever! I usually have to have someone go with me because I'm usually too dizzy to drive home. I always have to lay down, after passing out a few too many times I've learned my lesson. I certainly can't look at the needle or I'm done for! So I go to my "usual" room, lay down on the table, stick out my arm and look away. Thankfully (big shocker here) I had researched some of our next steps and knew shots were in our future, so I was prepared to have this discussion. I told him we were okay with injections if that's what it's going to take. After some more discussion he decided that he wants to try one more oral drug first.

Our next step is one month of Femara with internal ultrasounds to see if the Femara is helping anything to grow. I'm excited to move onto this step because we'll be getting ultrasounds quite frequently to monitor if the medicine is doing anything. We won't be guessing or waiting for blood results, we'll actually be able to see if any follicles are growing or not!

Femara is actually used to treat women with breast cancer. A little more in depth info: Aromatase is an enzyme that is responsible for the production of estrogen in the body. Femara works by inhibiting aromatase, thereby suppressing estrogen production. The result is that the pituitary gland produces more of the hormones needed to stimulate the ovaries.

If this next step doesn't produce ovulation, then the next month we will be doing Follitism injections. If that does nothing I believe our next step is to be referred on to a specialist at the University of Iowa hospital.

I'm relieved to have a plan, AND to be done with nasty Clomid (which if you weren't around me in the last months, count your blessings! Clomid had some pretty nasty emotional side effects).

Because I will be in Wisconsin for a week in July for graduation, we will start the ball rolling tonight in the hopes that all of my ultrasounds will be completed before I have to leave.

Overall I'm feeling excited and hopeful today... hopeful that this new medicine will do the trick. If it doesn't, I at least know what the next step is. When I'm left to ponder our next steps alone and stew in the results that what we just tried didn't work, I tend to get pretty sad, so this is a much better place to be emotionally. I've done quite a bit of research on infertility and it seems like the injections are pretty successful, so we'll keep our fingers crossed that if we need them next month they'll actually produce results for us.