I didn't get pregnant on my own naturally, so calm right on down if that's what you were thinking.
Previously on Self-made Motherhood Blog....our hero was trying to get the medical professionals around her to just give her some damned Femara and let her do her little home insemination. But forces against this were too great. Like I said in the last post, my regular gynecologist wouldn't prescribe Femara because it requires monitoring and she doesn't do all that. She referred me out to RE#2. RE2 was personable, knowledgeable, straight forward, and a woman of color (which makes me feel better because studies show that white medical professionals tend to give a lower standard of care to Black & PoC patients). I told her that I'd done four non-consecutive rounds of Clomid with my regular gyno, but I felt it didn't help (or, if it did, the Clomid was drying up all my CM and thinning my lining so that nothing fertilized could stick); so I wanted to switch to Femara/Letrozole (same drug, different brand names depending on what your insurance covers) because women who don't respond well to Clomid often respond much better on Femara (and vice versa). Plus, Femara doesn't have the side effect of thinning the uterine lining. RE2 got where I was coming from, but thought that Femara was a lateral move from Clomid and I should step up my game because I'm all old now and whatnot. Read the last post to see where I ended up with all that. Anyhoo...did the saline sonogram and she was able to see that my one big fibroid in the back wall of my uterus is definitely on the outside-ish and not interfering with anything. My tubes are clear and everything is the size and shape it ought to be. She literally told me I have beautiful uterus. This was all preliminary because, as I told RE2, I wasn't planning to try again until October (because that's what my bank account was telling me).
That brings us to the present-ish. I had to travel for work in the second week of September, so I scheduled my injectable FSH info session & consult for September 20th the week of my return so we could get meds and everything (FSH and all of its accoutrements have to be ordered through a specialty pharmacy). Great. My October cycle was set to begin on the 3rd or 4th of October, so just about two weeks exactly. About a week after the last visit with RE2, I get a call from the specialty pharmacy saying that my prescriptions are all ready and they just need my credit card so they can send it out to me via overnight post. Sure. How much? Oh, about $3200. Excuse me....WHAAAAAAT???? RE2 had said that the FSH, HCG trigger shot, and Ganirelix (another shot to stop your body from ovulating before your eggs are ready) should cost a couple hundred dollars with insurance. Apparently thirty-two hundred dollars. Needless to say, I did not give them my credit card number and called RE2 to initiate Plan B (which was my original Plan A - monitored Femara cycle with optional trigger shot and home IUI). She told me to call the clinic's IUI coordinator to ask about their financial assistance plan, which could give up to 75% discount on the meds if I qualified. At this point, my cycle is going to start in less than a week, and she wants me to jump through some more bureaucratic red tape in less than a week??? Fine, I call the IUI coordinator and leave a message. She rings me back the next day (because we have all the time in the world, right?) and tells me to go to some random third party website (First Steps) to apply. So...we're not even going to get into it that RE2 doesn't even seem to know that the clinic she works in doesn't even have a financial assistance program of its own, but if she had known that, it would have saved me two days of worry because she could have just directed me to the website herself. Funny story: When the IUI coordinator told me to go to the First Steps website, I asked for the web address and she seemed genuinely confused. Me: "What's the web address....? Like, FirstSteps.com or something else?" Her: "Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's it. Call me back when they tell you what discount you qualify for." THEN, on top of that, there is no FirstSteps.com. It doesn't exist. I had to Google "First Steps" and "infertility" to find it. Submitted the application, but had to wait until I got home to send it because they required last year's 1040 as proof of income, but you have to black out your social security number). Called RE2 back again because the IUI coordinator told me that turnaround on the application is usually about a week and it was already Thursday by this point. Whether I got a discount or not, it may not come in time for my October cycle (and I'll be damned if I'm spending fall and winter holidays tryna plan around all this instead of hanging out with my nieces and the rest of my fam, so probably not trying again until January or even March). Besides which, 75% off of $3200 is still several hundred dollars more than I was planning to spend on a single cycle. RE2 rang me back at 7:30 Friday night (I was finished with work, but prepping stuff for the next week, so I had to step outside to take the call). I told her about the timing for the discount application and that I wanted to prep for a Femara cycle like I'd originally asked her for. She acquiesced. Turns out the monitoring for Femara/Letrozole is way less rigorous than for the injectables. I'd start the Femara on cd5-9, then go in for an ultrasound to check how the follicles are growing on cd10 or 11, and the doc would tell me if/when to trigger. Plans made. Stress lessened by about 1000%. I could semi-enjoy my weekend. Now, due to converging life events, New York Comic Con was coming up the next weekend, and it just so happened that I had bought tickets for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday months in advance. I'd low-key forgotten about it because I was dealing with RE2 and her people since before I even left on my work trip at the beginning of September, so I hadn't requested the Friday off. I needed to construct an alibi. This required some thought. My guy boss saw my face when I came in from the phone call and asked if I was okay, but I kinda just shrugged it off. But then that seemed useful to my narrative. So on Saturday morning, I emailed work and constructed a careful tower of half truths to get the whole day off on Friday ("I'll need 24-48 hours to recover, so I scheduled the appointment for Friday, so I'd only have to miss one day of work."). Grace given. Friday off granted. I know this seems irrelevant, but it ties in to the story. Trust me. It'll all make sense when you read the next post.
Anyway, that's how I finally got the Rx for Femara/Letrozole. Funny, right? Stay tuned...
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