Embracing Life as a Crazy Cat Lady

Well.....

I don't even know where to start with this one. I expected the news we got yesterday but I don't think Mike did. I'm going to have to learn to love cats because it looks like Crazy Cat Lady is in my future.

The good news is that all my girlie parts are normal. No fibroids, polyps, strange shapes, tubes are clear, etc. I still make a crappy egg, but that is a fixable problem.

Mike's little swimmers, however, are worse than what we thought. His morphology remained the same at 1% but his other stats went down (like his count, etc.). What that basically means is that while he does make sperm, they are all funny looking and they can't do things that sperm normally do, like penetrate an egg.

I have no idea how we managed to conceive before between all of our issues.

The recommendation to us was Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection aka ICSI. ICSI is a procedure used with IVF. Basically Mike's sperm suck so bad they don't think we have a chance to conceive naturally and they want to hand select his little swimmers and stick them directly into my eggs. There really is no other way around male factor infertility. There is nothing they can do to fix morphology.

I've been expecting to hear these words since the first semen analysis so I am not totally devastated and heart broken. I was prepared for it. Mike seems totally devastated and heartbroken and I don't think he was really expecting this. He has an appointment with a urologist in another two weeks so we will see what that guy says.

The plan from here is to try Femara + progesterone and continue the process the old fashion way for 3 cycles. I'm not super hopeful but I'm not ready to pull the trigger on IVF yet. I have too many things going on this fall and through the holidays to be able to follow an IVF protocol so we will wait until spring.

I'll probably ask the RE for an additional 3 months after the first three to carry us through to January (I have to feel like I am doing something) and then hopefully we can start IVF/ICSI with my February cycle. I will give it one shot. That's it. After that we'll have to look into other options like donor sperm and IUI but I'm not thinking about that right now. That's a long way off.