Home Sweet Home!

I'm so very excited to be going home to Dallas this weekend!! If you happen to remember I was supposed to travel to Bismark back in November for a class and it ended up getting cancelled the week of.  My boss had told me to look for another location and fortunately there just happened to be a class in Dallas. With the 1 non-stop flight from Rapid to Dallas daily and the fact that they don't have to pay for a hotel the cost ended up being about the same so the hospital approved for me to go! I travel Thursday, the class is Friday and Saturday and I'll come back on Sunday. Basically, I'm getting PAID to go see my sister for 4 days!! Oh...and I have to sit in a class for 2 days but hey, its TEXAS!!!

In case you happen to be interested its a Fieldwork Educator Certification course.  Being a fieldwork educator is also known as being a Clinical Instructor (CI) or the therapist a student interns with for 3 months, 3 times before graduating from their OT program. You can be a CI without being certified, you just have to have a year of clinical experience but being certified makes you better equipped to be a CI, gives students more confidence in you as their CI and is highly favored by OT programs when choosing where to send students. I'm very excited about this because I LOVE teaching in the clinical setting. I get a student from The University of South Dakota at the end of May so I'll be looking forward to implementing new ideas with them.

So yay for short work week, learning, traveling and getting to do a little pre-birthday celebration with my sister!

Dr Smith

Today was my big appointment with Dr. Smith, my main office RE. She is the big decision maker and the one who does IVF. I was glad that I had the whole day off of work because I was pretty anxious all day waiting for this appointment. I got there early and fortunately they were running ahead of schedule so I was able to spend extra time with her (almost an hour and a half total time). I do love Dr. Smith. She has so much experience in her field, really cares for her patients and is very direct and to the point (which I appreciate).  I sat down in her office for the first half of the appointment and she reviewed my chart and everything we've been doing up to that point with Dr Diehl. Unfortunately, given my age, diagnosis and the amount of treatments we have done thus far she feels like we should have gotten pregnant months ago. Since we're not pregnant and everything is perfect on Todd's end she feels that I either have an egg quality issue or a fertilization issue and strongly recommends that we move onto  IVF after this cycle using the "Long Lupron" Protocol with ICSI (link is to another fertility clinic website, not mine) ICSI is usually used for sperm issues but if our case it would be to test fertilization issues.  If we decide to do IVF before Todd deploys we'll actually start the process pretty soon.

She doesn't think I need to do a lap surgery. She feels I have no real indication for one based on symptoms and other test results.

We are continuing with this IUI which will probably be on Tuesday based on today's ultrasound and how I've responded the last several months. Miracles do happen and we certainly still can get pregnant this month but statistically it's not very likely.

I feel like I have so much information to process. I never thought we'd be at this point.  I was able to talk to Todd right after the appointment but was pretty bummed he couldn't be there. Fortunately, he gets home on Friday.