35 is creeping around the corner...

I will start off by saying that surgery was a success! It was fairly painless and easy, doc says he got it all out, it was exactly a fibroid and not anything else (eek, they had to biopsy the tissue!) , and they sent me home with good painkillers. I didn't take any of those painkillers however, so I have them stashed for the occasion I sprain my ankle or have a nasty hangover (kidding! Geesh... I wouldn't actually admit that!) I'd love to send that report to the old doc in KC and say 'told ya so...' I'm still plotting out how I am going to tell them off. Any ideas would be great, because I really hate confrontation and I'm not sure how to word the letter other than- "thanks for being so crappy, not listening to me, refusing to do the test that found this huge issue, saying I may have old eggs and costing me so much money... you, you.... jerk!" See, not effective.

We talked with the doc from CCRM (Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine) today and he gave us a rough estimate of our new IVF timeline. When my next "cycle" starts (medical code for womanly things that I prefer to not discuss in public! Which is kind of weird, because apparently, I will discuss a lot of things...) I will start the whole med routine which also happens to include fairly strict exercise restrictions (dang, that's too bad). I will then go to Denver approx 5 weeks later for Retrieval (surgery under anesthesia again)! Depending if we send frozen embryos off for genetic testing or not, I will either be there about 7 days, or up to 14. We won't know about the genetic testing until we get about 5 days past egg retrieval. If there are several good ones, it is worth the testing to choose the truly best ones to optimize our chances of implantation- if there's just a few, might as well transfer 2 of them and see what happens. With the genetic testing, there is an 85% pregnancy rate if 2 of them come back normal. Not too shabby. Oh, I think I forgot to mention the testing is an additional $5000! Yowza!

So, this leads me to the title of this post... 35 is right around the corner for me. I don't really care about turning 35 really- not in any other sense than this whole damn infertility stuff. See, at 35 you become "advanced maternal age" (AMA). Old. At least to the gynos and reproductive endocrinologists. You are on the other side of that proverbial hill. I will be 35 in October and if we send the embryos off to genetic testing, it is possible that it will be AFTER my birthday when they transfer them back to me. It takes about 6 weeks to get genetic testing results back, then a few weeks after that to prep me for transfer, so I could easily be looking at mid to end of October for transfer! I will then have that sticker on my chart... the big one with red letters that all the other ladies in the waiting room will be able to see that says AMA... they all know what it means. I will look more closely for the crows feet I imagine they can see when they look up from the office copy of Parenting or O. It might be harder to bounce back and I may never wear my favorite pair of jeans again. Yippee! :-) I'll gladly feel old and take everything that comes with that territory just so this works...