Baseline?

I went in this morning for blood work. The CD3 bloodwork everyone kept talking about and saying they need to complete my file and submit to insurance blah blah blah. 

 

The day 3 blood is basically an annual baseline which I either completely forgot about from the past or it just blended in my memory with all the other appointments. I was so surprised when she asked to get my weight. I didn't know to expect it. I would have worn less bulky clothes! I definitely would have had less water this morning.

 

My vein wasn't behaving and I got stuck twice. It's literally only one spot on one vein that they can get to work. It took multiple minutes of rubbing, poking, smoothing, and squeezing my hand into a fist to finally get it on the second try. As she was finishing up, she told me which doctor will be doing my ultrasound.

 

Ultrasound? What ultrasound??  I'm on my heaviest day of my period. Gross! I didn't know there would be an ultrasound! I even walked in to the waiting room thinking "at least there's no ultrasound today" because I'm so crampy. And when I checked in I only circled blood work for today. I could not have been less mentally prepared for an ultrasound. I would have probably showered this morning instead of last night. I would have checked that my socks don't have holes in them. I definitely would have made more of an effort to get there early if I knew I'd have to wait for the ultrasound. UGH.

 

Thankfully not too long a wait - only 15 minutes. I made a point not to apologize for bleeding and tried not to be embarrassed by it. This is what my body is supposed to be doing. If the doc didn't want to see it he shouldn't have gotten into this field. Between the two of us, I'm the less comfortable one.

 

My ovaries aren't located in symmetrical locations so they can always find one easily but then have trouble with the other side. Looks like I have 12 on one side and 15 on the other. Perfect ovaries, according to doc. If only that's all it took.

 

I also needed to reconnect with the insurance IVF hotline. When I called to enroll last time it was 2015 and we had not yet done any procedures. This time, they needed information about what we're doing and why. The insurance nurse had a lot of questions, all of them personal. She needed to fill out her form, but I had a hard time with her sterile and emotionless tone. "How many times were you pregnant?" caused me to mist up. When I said there were two chemical pregnancies she asked, "And what happened?" which made me cry. I just said baby stopped growing. When she asked for more information I was like, Gee.... if we knew that I'd still be pregnant now and we wouldn't be having this stupid conversation.

Because we still have one frozen embryo available, insurance will likely deny a fresh IVF. The insurance lady said we can submit paperwork to see if the director would make an exception but it's against their policy and I feel like that's sending a lot of personal information around, dealing with a lot of coordination for paperwork between the clinic to insurance, and then getting a denial which we know is coming just isn't worth the aggravation. It's not like we'll lose the benefit dollars - we can still use them for FETs. Or future cycles assuming we don't have any embryos in storage.

 

It was an emotionally draining morning. We have to decide what we want to do so we can get on the schedule since it's filling up now. Hopefully I'll have an answer soon.

Shabbat shalom.