Friday, January 11, 2008

Fertility Clinic


We had our appointment at Columbia Fertility today. We chose them because of their Bethesda location, but it's still a pain to get to since they are not located near a metro. Basically K takes the metro from DC and I drive down and pick her up, then we drive 3 miles away to the clinic. It takes each of us about 45 min. each way, maybe a little longer for K, which is fine as long as we don't have to do this too many times in the middle of work like we did today.

We liked the clinic well enough. We're happy to have a female doctor. I used to have a male primary doctor, and the gyno exam was not very fun with his big male hands inside of me. I prefer nice petite women with slender fingers, thank you. I also feel that female doctors are friendlier and more willing to answer your questions.

Our doctor is Pakistani, and seemed pleased to find that K is Indian. K always gets that when she meets other Indians, they are happy to see her and say hello as if they are friends. I guess K has had this her whole life, but it took me some getting used to. We did not tell her that K's mom thinks she is Pakistani.

She said that she would expect that we would get pregnant in 6-8 cycles since I don't indicate any problems with fertility. That doesn't sound too bad if she's right. We asked a lot of questions, but after we left we realized we forgot to ask how it works. Oops.

She said that she expects the process to be relatively cheap since there aren't any fertility problems, which we appreciate. We've got a lot of money saved for this, but we'd like to spend that money on other things we need before the kid comes, including a bigger car with four doors and a bigger bed.

She suggested we inseminate using IUI (Intra-uteral insemination) at the clinic twice each cycle to increase the chances of conception. We were considering one IUI and one ICI (intra-cervical insemination) at home since it's more romantic and because K wants to be the one to knock me up, as she likes to say. But I like the idea of getting pregnant quickly, so we'll have to think about it.

So much to think about, but at least we liked the doctor.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Our doc is going to let my spouse press down the plunger so she's the one to knock me up. It's not exactly at-home, in-bed romantic but, hey, we'll just close our eyes and pretend.

Maybe you can suggest that as a compromise?