Ruffled Feathers

First of all, let me take a moment to say thank you! Y'all are so sweet to care about our appointments. Thanks for the love and the prayers yesterday... even Sam was feeling the love, so THANKS!

Unfortunately, yesterday was kind of a frustrating day. Don't get me wrong, at this point, I'm a firm believer that all information is good information... it may not be what I want to hear, but it's good information to have. However, with that said, yesterday was a lot of what I didn't want to hear. You may remember that we decided to go in with a BUNCH of questions to our two consultations. Our first consult was with Dr. Massey at Servy Massey Fertility Institute. This appointment, overall, went better than I expected, but I didn't go in with very high hopes. Dr. Massey was really nice. He answered ALL of my questions very thoroughly. He did call me "subfertile" rather than infertile, so I kind of wanted to punch him in the face, (my new biggest pet peeve!) but he meant it as a "thumbs-up" kind of thing, not a "are you two sure you know what you're doing?" kind of thing, so I resisted. He also called me "needy" and "high maintenance" and had a good chuckle with Sam over that, but I'm the first to admit this, so I let that slide. Particularly because in reference to question number six, "What will my level of contact be with the office? Will I have a direct way to speak with someone?", he simply rattled off his personal cell phone number. This scored him some MEGA points! He did try to convince me that I didn't want to freeze sub-par embryos, but when I pushed, he said he'd allow me to freeze whatever I wanted. The biggest thing that I liked about him and the office was that I would see him; I would have direct interaction with him at each monitoring appointment, and of course the cost savings is pretty huge. The greatest deterrents were:

1. location-both the main office (it took right at 2 hours to get to the appointment, even at 10am) AND the retrieval and transfer office (Augusta) require a good bit of travel
2. frozen embryos- there is an additional charge to freeze more than 8 embryos, and the FET success rates are moderate

In between our morning and afternoon appointments, we had time to swing by IKEA and to have a yummy lunch at Vini Vidi Vici. It's one of Sam's favorite restaurants, but it's in Atlanta and kind of pricey, so we never go. Sam had his favorite pasta and I had a yummy panini. In the midst of the business people of Atlanta discussing uber important things like real estate purchases and business mergers, we discussed my uterus and things like that. Good times.

The appointment at RBA was kind of blah. I don't really know what I was hoping for, maybe an offer for free IVF?!? Essentially, he didn't have a reason why IUI #4 failed, but when pushed, he said that at this point, he assumes we have either an egg quality issue or an embryo quality issue. Sad face times a million. He's hopeful that it could still be a fertilization problem (that ICSI would solve), but he doesn't really think that's it. I asked about the falling success rates and he suggested that it was probably due to the number of DOR patients they have been seeing in the last few years. He suggested that RBA is one of the top clinics and that women turn to them when they either fail at other clinics or when they are turned away by other clinics. This was one of those moments when my feathers kind of got ruffled. In my opinion (and in my experience) CCRM is the ULTIMATE collector of these types of patients. In fact, I currently have three blog friends who are cycling there and one more who intends to if her current cycle fails (fingers crossed). My point is this: CCRM takes them all, the non-existent AMH, the rejected, the repeat fails, and yet, they have a 65% success rate. I don't think a few additional DOR patients really explains a 10% decrease in success rates. In my opinion, CCRM has the right to charge $13,080 for IVF for 65% success rates, but RBA doesn't have the right to charge $13,500 for 34% success rates... see where I'm coming from? Needless to say, his reasoning kind of ruffled my feathers. However, he made a really strong case for them in regards to future children. In his opinion, going through RBA is like securing a sibling. He's pretty darn confident that we will have success and that we will have frozen embryos. The question then becomes who do I entrust with these embryos? He argued that they have one of the most sophisticated labs and freezing techniques, and they have the stats to back it up. They do significantly more FETs that most clinics and have a 50% success rate for each transfer. This is pretty huge to me.
That along with the convenience of the Gwinnett office are the two biggest perks. The things I don't love are:

1. cost (obviously)
2. contact with the clinic- it's apparently completely plausible that I could complete my ENTIRE IVF cycle and never see Dr. Slayden. He doesn't do monitoring appointments and transfer and retrieval will be by whoever is on call. I find this odd, and immensely frustrating.

I really hoped that after yesterday's two appointments I would be coming here to yell you guys our plan. Unfortunately, I'm not. Shocking, I know. The Greavu's are nothing if not thorough (err, slow) at making decisions. The good news is that we left both appointments on the same page (miracle), so we won't have to wrestle for the right to decide (I'd obviously win).  If you've hung with us this long, thanks, I promise some day we'll decide on something and actually move forward. Until then...