The BIG Day Out

April 24th came around. I was pretty excited. Kylie and i were spending two whole days together (the next day being the Anzac Day holiday) and we had nice things planned for our anniversary and we were spending a whole day on our IVF appointments.

The Counsellor
Seeing a counsellor together is part of standard IVF program. Kylie and i had talked over some of the issues at home, things like:

- what would the baby call us
- known donor vs anonymous donor
- telling our parents
- discrimination or potential bullying at school
- what surname the baby would have (we still don't have the answer for this one!)
- how we would cope financially

The counsellor was nice and we talked through all the issues, she mostly was focused on telling the child that about their conception and that a sperm donor was used. We had no real issue with that and didn't really see it as a big problem, so all was good!
One of the strange things was talking about 'our baby' - we hadn't really had to talk about 'our baby' with anyone yet. All the talk had been about sperm, eggs, fertilisation, ultrasound, injections and so on. Suddenly we were talking about a baby!

The best bit about seeing the cousellor was talking about the sperm donors. She was going to arrange to give us a set of potential donors to take away with us so that we could make a decision on which one to use. Now that was exciting! Getting to choose our baby's father!

The Nurse
The Nurse spoke at a mile a minute! She went through each of the steps of the process and each of the medications that i had to take and when and why and how and how to inject and how to spray something up my nose and when to ring someone and when to start taking the pill and......
At the end she says "So, have you got that?"
I just nod stupidly, somewhat dumbfounded, but thankfully Kylie asks a whole host of really intelligent questions that enable us to go through the process from start to finish and actually understand clearly what is to occur. Why can't i think of good questions like that under stress?? I would have just gone home and then worried about how it was supposed to work!

The Accounts Department
So, next stop is the accounts department. The girl we meet there who is supposed to explain to use how much it is all going to cost is a ditzy airhead type. We sit down and get started and one of the first things she asks is "Are you using your own sperm or a donor?"
....ummm....
"Yeah, we thought Kylie might just shoot it out of her finger".
Ok, so we didn't say that. But it was clear at this point that we were dealing with an idiot.
Accounts girl goes on the try and explain all of the costs, but successfully manages to confuse both of us. Though i'm pretty sure the issue was not with the listeners....
Finally, we get a grasp on how much we think things are going to cost and to be honest, it wasn't as bad as i thought, roughly $5k - $6k for the whole stim cycle and embryo transfer (don't worry, i'll get to explaining it all a bit later).

Specialist
Kylie and I both went to see Dr ManofFewWords again as well on that day. He just confirmed that we were all ready to start and then that was it.
I remember his words, he said he expected that we would be pregnant within one to two tries. He actually said "This will be a walk in the park for you".