The Trouble With Our Clinic

 

Even though we are looking undergoing IVF in India in order to increase our chances with more embryos available to transfer, there is a lot of tests and pre-work that we need to complete here before our trip.  This means that we will need to get our clinic here looped in to coordinate these tests with us before our trip.  We also find that if I was to start the stim meds here than we could shave 5 days off of the trip.  Five days could be a lot.

The difficulty in starting stim meds here is that a clinic here would have to be willing to prescribe the medication - unfortunately the medications cannot be shipped over from India.  Also, the medications cannot be obtained without a doctor's prescription so we will need to have a clinic on board.

We called our clinic to let them know about our plans about going to India, that we would like their help with tests and pre-work for the cycle, and that we would like to start the stim meds here.  We have gotten information from the clinics regarding the drug protocols they would use and they are similar to (if not the exact same) that we did with our clinic the last time.

Unfortunately we cannot get in to see our doctor until next month - not uncommon for our clinic unfortunately.  That is part of the gig when working with one of the top clinics in the Twin Cities.  Our nurse is able to weigh in on the situation in the mean time though.  They have only done "monitoring" for another clinic occasionally and an international clinic only a couple of times, and it was minimal at best.  She is pretty certain that our doctor will not feel comfortable being the prescribing doctor for us.

We are admittedly surprised by this answer.  The anticipated protocol is exactly (or very close to) the same as the one that we did last time with the clinic.  Our doctor said that if we were to do another cycle (which they were recommending to try to get better egg quality) that the protocol would not change.  Were they worried about me getting OHSS - I was borderline with the last cycle?  If that was the case than wouldn't they propose changing my next cycle since wouldn't the exact same protocol mean a possibility of OHSS here?

No, we think that the answer may not actually be related to a health issue for me.  As IVF is a numbers game, we think the answer itself lies in the numbers.  If we start a cycle with the clinic and finish it elsewhere, it shows up us a cancelled cycle in the stats.  In the end, we suspect that it is really about the stats.