(Late) State of the Uterus Address

Sorry it took me so long to get back here! BoyWonder's mom has been in the hospital (her gallbladder stopped working and had to be removed), and I've been trying to shop for shower gifts for BFF and godBaby, so things have been just a little bit hectic.

So, my follow-up appointment with the RE was Tuesday. Most of what BoyWonder told me was accurate, but I'll go into detail now that I have them straight from the RE.

He removed a benign polyp. It was located on the right wall of my uterus, right next to my cervix. The RE said that while it probably wasn't causing any hormonal changes, it was close enough to my cervix that it very well may have been preventing sperm from getting where they need to be.

He also found and removed some stage 1 (mild, not aggressive) endometriosis. He said he actually almost didn't catch this, because it was a different formation than what he typically sees--what I had was vessicular endometriosis, which means it shows up as blistery veins, rather than the more common gunpowder burn look, or endometrial cysts. It was located along one side of my bladder, and also on the tendons (or ligaments, maybe? I can not for the life of me remember which) that hold the uterus in place.

So for those of you who don't know (including me, right up until this week), endometriosis can cause infertility for a host of reasons, including tissue buildup, scar tissue formation, blocking tubes, or, in my case (probably, since it wasn't blocking or restricting anything), an over-production of prostaglandins, which are hormones that are an important part of fertilization of eggs, and the implantation of a fertilized egg.

And the cysts. They were not, as BoyWonder led me to believe, ovarian cysts. Nope. These guys were also on the right wall of my uterus, almsot completely blocking my right tube. The RE said that there were several very big issues these cysts could have caused. Most cysts cause production of hormones, which throws off all the other hormone production in my body. There's a chance these cysts were inhibiting tubal motility (moving the egg from the tube to the uterus), they could possibly have been the reason I rarely ovulate from my right side (and when I do, it's a 'weak ovulation,' where I typically ovulate really late and my temperature doesn't spike like it does when I ovulate from the left side). Also, he said that had I ovulated from the right side, and that egg had fertilized, there was a pretty good chance of an ectopic pregnancy and probable loss of the entire tube.

So... Holy Shit.

All of that is gone now, though. The RE gave me our odds on our own (10-12% each cycle--a normal healthy couple has a 20% chance), and told me that a medicated IUI cycle raises our chances by 3-4%. Which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but when you look at it, that raises us from 10% to 13 or 14%, or from 12% to 15 or 16%. That's almost the same as a 'normal' couple.

The plan for now, though, is to try on our own for the next through months. For one thing, the holidays are looming. As you probably know by this point, I work retail and this is the busiest, most stressful time of the year. And then, when you figure in the fact that there are several whole weeks where the clinic is on weekend hour policy (calling the nurse on call for anything, no appointments/procedures after noon), and several days of November and December where they aren't doing any appointments or procedures at all, it just doesn't make sense to add the stress of medicated IUI cycles to all the other stress and frustration.

Plus, we really need to get the hysteroscopy paid off before we can justify dropping more money on medicated cycles when we still have better odds trying on our own (well, better than before, which was apparently almost completely impossible).

BoyWonder keeps telling me that we did it once without any help, and we can do it again. I think he'd be happy to try on our own for another year, but right now the plan is to go back to medicated IUIs if we're not pregnant after the new year.

So... Yay?

I actually came away from the follow-up feeling really hopeful and encouraged, so maybe (just maybe) I can keep channeling that feeling for the next couple of months.