Smart Doctors...

Lisa's journey with doctors began a little better than mine.  Her OB/GYN diagnosed her with endometrial hyperplasia, a scary sounding condition that carries a risk of being cancerous.  Fortunately for us, her biopsy was negative, but if we wanted to get pregnant, we were going to have to call in "the big guns".  Her doctor referred us to a friend of his, Dr. David Saffan, at Shady Grove Fertility in Annandale.  On our first visit, we met with Dr. Saffan, and his nurse Pam.  We've worked closely with them over the last two years on our journey to turn the dreams of parenthood into a reality.

I read a lot of comments about Shady Grove being nothing but an "IVF Baby Factory", and that the treatment there was impersonal.  Lisa and I were looking to have a baby, not make a new friend, so this was fine with us.  However, our treatment there from consultation through two IVF cycles was not only professional and thorough, it was also very personal.

Because we had been trying to conceive for such a long period of time, and were in our mid-thirties, Dr. Saffan saw no need to mess around.  He ordered comprehensive testing on both of us, and the results were pretty staggering.  Lisa was diagnosed with a condition called PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) which pretty much rules out normal ovulation.  In addition, she also has something called MTHFR, a condition that causes her blood to clot abnormally fast, and prevents her from absorbing folic acid.  Even if we were to have gotten pregnant on our own, the odds of delivering a healthy baby were against us.

To make matters worse, the two idiots doctors who had prescribed me Androgel had inadvertently turned off my body's ability to make sperm.  My first test came back with a whopping count of zero.  Not one swimmer.  I was sent immediately to see a urologist who specializes in fertility, Dr. Paul Shin.  He ordered a battery of tests, which all ruled out physical abnormalities, so he recommended coming off of the flammable testosterone and retesting in six weeks.  By then my count had returned to normal levels, but my motility - the ability for the swimmers to actually reach the egg, was somewhat compromised.

Shady Grove laid out the treatment possibilities, and IVF assured us a greater than 60% chance of getting pregnant. As Dr. Saffan explained, none of this ruled out us conceiving naturally.  However, the odds of this happening had decreased from 30% for normal couples to basically 1 in a million.  We immediately began preparing for IVF.  Thank goodness for smart doctors.