Back on the treadmill

Well, I'm pretty much decided. I'm going to do another IVF cycle. I was going over my bank accounts yesterday, and figured out if I take X amount from here, Y amount from there, cash in Z mutual fund, and file my tax return electronically really effing early so I get the rebate quickly, I can make the financing work.

The remaining thing left to decide is where to do it. Do I do it with my current RE, who I know and love, and who has been working with me over the whole stims protocol thing, or do I go to a fancy place like CCRM or Cornell? I'm wary of SIRM because they are so in your face about how much better they are than everyone else, and yet won't release their stats in the same form as everyone else, because the stats are misleading. Riiight. Cornell's stats for 2004 for my age group were a full 10% lower than my clinic's. 10% is huge in this business. H U G E. Now of course, Cornell's patients may be 90% difficult cases that come to them from failures at other clinics, and that could account for the difference. But still, 10% is a lot to think about. CCRM has better stats, of course, but I hear that they turn people away if their cases are too difficult. And let's face it, if anyone is at high risk for being turned away, it's me.

So I don't know what to do. I guess I'll try for a consult, maybe at Cornell, as a second opinion, and see what they say. I'm worried that all these other clinics will look at my age, history and results and say that I should be on the ganirelix/cetrotide protocol (sorry, I have a mental block over whether that's the agonist protocol or the antagonist protocol - I think antagonist, but I'm not sure). I'm very concerned about trying that protocol, because all my poor results have been because of a dominant follicle situation and I don't think ganirelix can fix that. So I think I'd have another poor result if I tried it. I don't know, but I want an RE to tell me positively that I wouldn't before trying it out, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't ever give me a 100% certainty on anything. I really think I want to try another long lupron protocol.

Oh well, much to think about. I've ordered a "coping with infertility" book, and a mind-body CD thing from Amazon to give me some light reading over the holidays. Hopefully they won't be a crock of shit as half the other things I've bought over the years have turned out to be.

And in other news, I received a catalog in the mail yesterday from the sperm bank, and the donor I have been using for the IVF cycles is back in the program. He'd previously sold out. It would be so tempting to buy more vials, as I really like this donor, but I promised myself that if I did more cycles after this (yes, there's a chance that I'll be even more of a weirdo and go on to IVF #6), I'd change donor. But Ididn't see any others in the catalog that caught my eye. Sniff. Maybe I should look on it as a sign that I will finally get pregnant and then be able to try for a sibling in a couple of years. Yeah right, like getting a sibling will be easy! Like I'll be able to walk past the vial and get knocked up because I'm so fertile. That's me, all over, that is, fertile myrtle.