In the beginning...

We started this journey in January 2004 when I stopped taking the pill. 6 months and no periods later, I was at the doc asking questions and reviewing my old med files. To my shock, he reminded me I have PCOS and an ultrasound confirmed it. After the shock and a call to my mom, she reminded me that I did know I had this, but had not cared so much about it when I found out at 18. Boy, I should have been paying attention!


It is all foggy now, almost 5 years later, to recall all that has happened since then. What I do remember the most are these words "you are tough case my dear". Those words have been said over and over to me, by 3 doctors! Great.

We started with (mere) clomid** and temping. Nada. My temps were everywhere and even with clomid I didn't ovulate. Eventually, we added femara and spironolactone and Prednisone, still no ovulation. The only periods I would have were those induced by 10 days of progesterone. The visits to this doctor were usually code-able under PCOS so I hadn't had any problems with the insurance company yet. A year and half later, my first doctor became frustrated and referred me to a fertility clinic in Big H.

We went nervously to see Dr. Money and entered into our first full on Infertility Clinic. It was intimidating and heart breaking to be asked "how much money do you make" on our first visit. That just made us feel like they couldn't help us unless we had thousands of dollars to give them which we DID NOT (obv). And it was so much about the numbers in other ways too. They acted reluctant to take our case if they couldn't get a good outcome because that would bring down their success rates. Also, there was a whole huge process with the billing department where it was confirmed that we didn't have insurance coverage. This started our battle with trying to pay for all this stuff. It had taken us a while to get in with this clinic and so now we were approaching the 2 year mark. We knew we had to do something more than clomid or femara, but we weren't ready for full on IVF and we didn't know much about IUIs at the time. We just new our local doctor couldn't tackle it. But Mr. Money's bedside manner left alot to be desired. My husband says that he like him fine, but he could tell that I didn't like him because I was rude to him. I remember fighting about this briefly. I was so upset that he wasn't on my side and he made it sound like it was just me that didn't like him. Either way, I thought I needed to be comfortable and I wasn't ready for an IVF clinic, so I decided to go to another Dr a family member was going to.

Dr. H was still in H-town, but he was somehow more willing to cater to my needs than Dr. Money. And at the time that was very comforting, plus he didn't ask me what we did for a living. Just overall I was more at ease with him. His practice was fairly new, which meant first class attention. So we cut it off with the other doctor right away. I wondered then if we would ever regret that decision. But we moved forward with Dr. H. We had already done alot of testing with Dr. Money so we had those transferred to Dr. H. All my blood work was fine, except for the PCOS parts which we knew about. So then we did SA on the hubby. His numbers were great except for low morphology. So then we knew what we were dealing with.

However, all of this was so expensive and we were paying out of pocket, not to mention driving 2 hours for appointments and procedures. Unfortunately, money is what has ultimately guided most of our decision making, as I am sure it is for many, many, many IF couples. That, and the fact that, indeed, I am a tough case my dears.

** I found clomid super cheap at cost.co