First appointment

It has taken me a while to get around to writing a post about our first appointment. It was such a big day! We arrived a little early and then we had to wait about half an hour, but there were lots of magazines to read and the waiting room was comfortable.

We saw Dr G first. He talked to us for a while and then he gave me an internal pelvic ultrasound. It wasn't as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. The doctor chatted away the whole time and explained what he was doing as he wiggled the stick around. I could see both of my ovaries in turn, one smaller and paler than the other. Dr G said that everything looked normal and healthy, which is really good news. I've never been pregnant before or even had any scares so I was hoping that I had no problems. The monitor was positioned so that D could see but I'm not sure how interesting he found it! Dr G is very nice and didn't treat us like he had done this hundreds of times before.

We had some time before our next appointment, so we went and had some lunch and visited the library. Then we were back at 2pm to see Dr C. We talked a bit about my heart condition. I have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy for which I had a couple of open-heart surgeries a decade ago. Although I have no cardiac problems at all now, the doctors are going to want to keep a careful eye on things. Although I don't want too much extra intervention or monitoring, I know that carrying and giving birth to a baby is enormously stressful on my body. I'd rather be safe than sorry!

Dr C also needed to know about my cycle and where I was up to so that she could schedule our next appointments. I have a very short cycle of 21 to 23 days, which makes things a little interesting. I need to start having daily injections on day two of my cycle, so we had to count forward and then count back again. The upshot is that the medication will be couriered to our house in the week of 10 October and I will start having the injections sometime in the following week. Then I will have a trigger injection to make me ovulate and, if all goes well, eight to ten eggs will be ready for harvest around 24 October. On the same day, D will have some sperm extracted (ouch!), and a very clever person with a very, very small pipette will pop the sperm into the eggs. After the fertilised eggs have had a chance to develop into embryos, one will be implanted and the rest will be frozen so that we can try again if necessary. Dr C said that with all the odds added up, we have a 70% chance of pregnancy from this round of stimulated ovulation.

The final part of our day was an appointment with a nurse who taught D how to inject me with the syringe. We decided that he should do it to help him feel involved - or maybe I'm just too queasy to inject myself! We will see how it goes but it honestly doesn't look too challenging. We will receive a kit with everything we need and the syringes are all preloaded.

October feels like a very long time away but I am feeling really very positive about this whole process. It is a little hard to believe that next July or August we could have a real live baby in our house but at the same time I can't quite see this not succeeding. A 70% chance is enough for me right now!