(N.B - This is part two of the story, ensure you’ve read part one before proceeding)
How does one get from making the decision to try IVF, to actually doing it? Here’s how it went down:
Step One: Procrastinate. If you’re us, you procrastinate for a minimum of 24 months before even discussing it. Then, once the awkward discussion about who’s genitals are more than likely broken and why, procrastinate for another 6 or so months before thinking about it again. After all, there’s a chance the problem may just fix itself and then no one will have to go get their junk out on a hospital bench to be dissected.
Step Two: Research Over a few wines one night, you drag out your laptop and Google 'fertility clinics' and reviews and read a lot of grammatically cringe-worthy rants, read a lot of websites that have pretty much the same info on them, and you use all of that to make an uneducated guess about where you want to go for a complicated process you don’t really don't understand.
We decided on a clinic basically only because Isaac had worked on their website before. We picked our doctor because we thought she was young, pretty, educated, and wasn’t reminiscent of a 100 year old reptilian man. Really, you’re going to base your decision on who you’d prefer looking at your muff, right? Or was that just me? It’s like online dating. “No, no, gross, what the hell is that? That one looks like he’ll be dead next week! Oo she’s hot. I bet her hands are gentle”. And thus, that decision was done.
Step Three: Get a referral & tests done You can’t see any doctor who charges a lot of money without a referral right? So we each made an appointment with our GP and asked for a referral to the pretty lady with gentle hands. If your GP is good, like ours was, they’ll send you for a heap of blood tests, egg reserve test, and ah, ‘spooge’ tests prior to your appointment with the high paying doctor. That way, you send all the results to the good doctor before your appointment and you don’t waste your first appointment with only half the info they need, and they’re just going to send you to go get all the same tests anyway. Right, so referral in one hand, blood and other miscellaneous fluids in the other.
Step Four: Contact your chosen doctor and make an appointment This step is self-explanatory. You’ll make an appointment, send them all your test results, and oh yes, organise time off work for it. The IVF world doesn’t do after hours like your common peasant doctor’s surgery. Why would they? They’re on the big bucks; shit rolls downhill baby, profits roll up.
Step Five: Attend the appointment This is a fact-finding appointment. You’ll be asked a lot of questions, some of them fairly normal, some of them not. How do you ask someone with a straight face if they’ve ever bent their penis so far it broke? Anyway, lots of fun questions. And also - a surprise probe! That’s right folks. The lady garden was in no way prepared when our lovely doctor gets up and fists the ultrasound probe, waves it threateningly at me and informs me pleasantly that she’d like to inspect my insides. Suuuuuure… why not…
In light of all the information at hand (i.e. all of our tests so far have come back with 'we don't know why you're having problems'), she recommends to me to have an operation - a laparoscopy, to physically inspect my internal organs to see if there might any obvious reasons for our issues. Unfortunately for us ladies, all we can do is describe symptoms. They can’t really check anything at all without slicing into you for an actual look with their own eyeballs. Blood tests and the delightful probe don’t really give much but a vague idea.
So, we agree to that. It scares me. It seems like a pretty big elective op that might actually lead to complications that could completely screw our chances of conceiving naturally. But, what the hell, we said we’d investigate our issues so that’s what we’re gonna do.
Step Six: Get shivved by the lovely doctor You can re-read about my amazing shivving experience here
Step Seven: Be really fucking sore & surprisingly tired for a few weeks
Step Eight: Go back to the lovely doctor for a follow up At the post-op appointment, she recommends we hold off on IVF for a few months because the chance of natural conception may have been increased by the surgery based on the fact she removed a lot of endometriosis which may interfere with things.
PROCEED TO PHASE THREE