Another doctor’s appointment today…or should I say last doctor’s appointment today.
Let me back up.
Last week I wasn’t doing so well. I didn’t handle the news that this was a failed cycle with much grace, although I would really love to blame that on the daily 200mg of clomid. But I guess it doesn’t really matter too much why.
So, I took the week, got my emotional crap together and had another appointment on Monday. Basically no change, except that my doc actually counted all my follicles on the different planes of my ovaries. I was apparently wrong in my previous post when I said we had 10-15 follicles respond. We actually counted 16…on just the right ovary. So, really I had closer to 25-30 follicles respond, and still no dominant follicle.
Fast forward to today. One more appointment. No change. I still had about 30 follicles, none bigger than 5mm even though this was CD19. So, my doc told me, because I had already paid for it, I could come in for another scan sometime next week to see if I had a follicle start to mature. However, he said that he didn’t think there was a chance of it happening.
We talked a little bit about moving forward and what we were going to do, and I shared with him that my husband and I were thinking about going on birth control pills while we saved up for our IVF. He did not like that idea. He help trying to tell me that there is a chance, an impossibly small chance, that my husband and I could get pregnant on our own because our only problem is that I don’t ovulate regularly. However, I reminded him that the reason I even ended up in his office was because I had gone seven months bleeding three out of every four weeks. I explained that I did not want to go through that again, and I was willing to waive that slim chance of pregnancy in favor of regulating my menstrual cycles.
He then told me that, if I was interested, there was one more medicine that he would be willing to try with me called Letrozole. I have done very minimal research on Letrozole on my own, and didn’t really know much about it. As I have said before, one of the things I like best about my doctor is that he is a straight shooter. He doesn’t lie to me or mislead me, and he gives me the information so I can make my own decisions. So, I really appreciated it when he told me that Letrozole is not FDA approved for treatment of infertility. It is actually a medicine used in patients with breast cancer because it reduces the amount of estrogen and forces the body to produce more FHS (thus causing ovulation). Sounds okay to me so far. I didn’t like that it wasn’t FDA approved, but I was willing to listen. Until he told me that the women who used it for breast cancer and got pregnant had a much higher rate of birth defects. Then I found out that animal studies show the same thing. There really haven’t been any studies done that look at birth defects in women who only use it for fertility, but he informed me that his office does use it for women who are clomiphene resistant and they’ve never had any birth defects. He said this is likely because you take it for a short time, like clomid, and by the time you actually get pregnant the medicine is out of your system.
However, I just don’t know if I feel comfortable using a medicine to try and get pregnant that causes birth defects. From what I’ve read, Letrozole is as effective as clomid at inducing ovulation, however there have been no studies looking at whether or not it increases actual pregnancy or live births (not even discussing whether or not those are healthy births).
So, my husband and I are going to have a nice long talk about whether or not it is something we want to do.
If it is, we will be going back next cycle to try one last medicated round.
If not, I’m going to go on BCP and we’ll take our 2ish years to save up the money to try IVF.
Stay tuned, because the road might be getting a little bumpy up ahead.
