“Are you here for a little chat today?”
That is my RE’s nurse’s way of asking if she should get the dildocam and the KY ready. Very delicate. As though Dr. B and I are going to have a cup of tea, maybe some Peek Freans (oh man, that link made me hungry), and discuss the weather or our plans for back-to-school. Actually, generally when she’s poking around in there, we *do* discuss the weather and our plans for whatever. I think doctors learn the Art of the Small Talk (“Have you seen the construction on the corner of Grafton? Now, just scoot your bum down a little further. Yeah, they’ve got the street torn up over there! Lots of detours.”) alongside learning How To Warm A Speculum.
Anyway. We were. There for a chat, that is. We were there to discuss my surgery, and go further into detail about what Dr. F had explained after said surgery.
Dr. B came in, sat down, and said “Well.”
That “Well” was loaded with “We have some Big Things to discuss” overtones.
“What did Dr. F tell you, Louise?”
“Well, basically, that from the outside everything looked normal, but from the inside, everything was… weird, and he’d never seen anything like it before”.
“Yes, well, that’s pretty much it. From the outside, everything looked perfect. It’s when they put the dye in that they noticed that it didn’t go anywhere – not through your Fallopian tubes- it just absorbed into the walls of the uterus because it had nowhere else to go. That shows that the tubes are blocked. After that, he put the camera in. This is where it gets interesting. When he first put the camera in, he thought maybe he had created a false channel- that’s where instead of putting the camera inside the uterus, he might have poked it into the muscle itself- because the cavity was so small. But he hadn’t; he checked a few times. There’s no endometriosis or tumours, nothing that can be removed or fixed; you’re not bicornuate or unicornuate… it’s just a tiny cavity, with blocked tubes.”
She went on to speak about our options.
“IVF would probably not work for you, because there would be very little chance of a fertilized egg being able to implant. Now. Gestational surrogacy would be a good choice for you, since Rob’s tests were all normal, and we have found that you do ovulate with the help of Clomid”(and, since I went off the Clomid in February, I have continued to do so fairly regularly) “so you do have eggs. There are a few gestational surrogates in Atlantic Canada – two sisters in PEI, and one other lady in New Brunswick. They’re all pregnant right now, though… of course you could find your own surrogate. Age isn’t so much a factor with gestational surrogates because she wouldn’t need to produce any eggs – anyone up to age 40 with a normal uterus, who has had one or more uncomplicated pregnancies in the past, would do. Of course compensating a surrogate is illegal in Canada so you would only have to pay for the IVF and the counselling and legal fees. There’s also adoption – depending on which route you go, it could be more or less expensive, but there wouldn’t be that much of a difference, I don’t think”.
She also offered to send my information to the fertility clinic in Halifax, to see if they’d want to do a hysteroscopy, because she had no name for what’s wrong with me – again, had never seen it before, in her 20 years as an RE – and maybe they’d have further insight into the whole thing. We said she might as well ask, but we’re not really hopeful.
I hadn’t realized it, but I had been holding out some tiny glimmer of hope – that she would say “Oh, no worries, we’ll just scoop out the weird part of your uterus and drill holes through to the Fallopian tubes and voila! babies!”
This is when I fully, 100% realized that, barring some miraculous influx of cash or magical barley seeds, we will never be parents.
(more…)
