Trying new things

I’ve been feeling wildly adventurous lately. Ok, not really. But I did try two new food items today. Split pea soup and peach yogurt. Last night when I went grocery shopping I was checking out the soup selections and realized that I had never had split pea soup. I just assumed I wouldn’t like it because it is green and mushy looking. Plus, it is frequently made with ham, but this was vegetarian. Well, it turns out that I don’t hate split pea soup. I think it is kind of boring, but I don’t hate it. And the peach yogurt thing was just a whim. That experiment was a success, which means now I can have yogurt flavor variety.

I mentioned all this food exploration to a friend in passing today (we were discussing how I don’t like carrot cake, and I was explaining that I felt I had tried enough new food for one day) and she asked, half kidding, if I was going to blog about the pea soup. And here I am, writing about it. But really it is just a set up for the segue into talking about the other new thing I’ve tried recently…the new doctor.

I’ve already written and discarded two posts about the new fertility doctor and clinic. I’m not sure why. I think it has something to do with my reluctance to seek treatment or talk about my infertility in general. But I’m trying to put all of that behind me now. Time is passing. I was 32 when I started trying to conceive; I’ll be 35 in March. And 35 seems to be some sort of magic fertility number, so my watchwords for this year are positive, assertive and aggressive. I’ve got to keep a positive attitude. I’ve got to be assertive in discussing what I want with the doctors. And I can’t hang back from treatment and hope for the best. If I really do want a baby (or really, a chance at more than one child) it is time to get serious.

So, the new clinic. The visit went well. It’s clear that this will be very different from the treatment I was doing before. My old doctor didn’t have any associates. Hell, half the time she didn’t even have a receptionist. This new place is definitely in the business of fertility. I now have an RE – a man, and I while I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about that, he was actually very easy to talk to – a nurse who will schedule appointments for me and get coordinate testing, prescriptions, instructions and results, and a financial coordinator who will work with my insurance company and get approvals and information about what is covered or not covered. They have lab facilities and acupuncturists and support groups and classes where you learn how to give yourself injections. The new doctor seems to think my old doctor was on to something with her diagnosis of potential non-standard PCOS. That may be why I’m having such a hard time losing weight, too. If they start me on Metformin it could make a huge difference, apparently. They want to repeat blood work on me and on John, and they want me to do another HSG. Apparently the tubes can spasm shut during the test, so maybe I don’t have a blocked right fallopian tube after all. Although I’m inclined to think that I do, personally. But even if I do, they may be able to try to thread something through the tube if they see a blockage during the HSG to see if they can open it up. No matter what they find, he seemed to think there was still reason to believe that doing an IUI with injectables could work. And there’s still a ton of stuff we haven’t tried yet. So I left feeling a little overwhelmed, but also very hopeful.