Patience and Preparation!

The biggest thing I can tell anyone who is wanting embark on an IVF journey is patience is a virtue.  It can be very frustrating, especially not being able to plan things and not knowing.  Uncertainty is scary.  I'm a reasonably patient person anyway and I'm finding it hard work but I imagine if I weren't, this would be very much unbearable.  I'm somewhat torn at the moment between wanted to stay busy to keep myself distracted and being way too drained from the medications to do anything!  I'm well aware that once I get to the 2 week wait (the 2 weeks between having an embryo transferred and finding out if you're pregnant) it will be the longest 2 weeks ever so practicing distraction techniques and patience now is not a bad idea.

The other important thing, especially if you're wanting PGD IVF for a genetic condition, is to get started early.  From our first appointment with the GP to starting our first IVF cycle was 18 months.  That was with everything going pretty smoothly as well!  I'd read on another blog (www.survivinghuntingtons.blogspot.co.uk) a few years ago that you should get the process in motion before you're ready because if you wait until you're ready to have kids, you're then looking at another couple of years after that before you even have a chance of being pregnant.  She completely hit the nail on the head.  I've always known I wanted children by my mid 20s and we had our first appointment when I was 22.  I'm now 24 so if this cycle works I'll give birth sometime when I'm 25.  If not, I've still got a few years to play with.  If we'd waited until now to see our GP I could have been in my 30s long before I had a child.

With having a child naturally there's always the risk that you may have fertility issues and take a while to get pregnant, but at the same time if you start early you could get caught straight away.  With PGD you know that it will be a long process from the outset.  These are the steps we've been through from the beginning - often with a couple of months in between:

• Appointment with the GP to ask for a referral for PGD IVF.
• Appointment at our local hospital with a Clinical Geneticist to discuss the genetic side of things and our options for IVF.
• Appointment in Sheffield (satellite centre for Guy's Hospital in London) with the Genetics Team to discuss in more detail the process involved from a genetic viewpoint.  We also had bloods done at this stage (myself, ALS and his father) to enable them to create the genetic test for embryo biopsy.
• Appointment with the Fertility Unit in Sheffield to discuss the fertility side of things and arrange preliminary fertility tests.  This also involved an internal scan.
• ALS had to provide a sperm sample and I had to have bloods done on day 2 and 21 of my menstrual cycle.
• Further appointment with Fertility Unit in Sheffield to go through the test results - fortunately everything was OK.
• Multidisciplinary meeting with Genetic Consultant, Fertility Consultant and Fertility Nurse (who was our main point of contact from this point going forwards).
• Appointment with Fertility Nurse to discuss treatment cycle and to be shown how to do the injections ourselves.  We were given the date to stop my pills and to come back to the clinic to start the cycle (19th August).

And that brings us up to date...