Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The results are in...

So, I have been waiting patiently to get the results of mine and DH's bloodwork from the RE and I finally talked to him this morning. It turns out that even though we were hoping for a positive CF it was not. Apparently, all of our hormones are normal. YUCK! See now that it is positive the RE is sure that DH has NOA. YEAH!!!! (Trying to be sarcastic in hopes to not cry). Our next option is TESE, if we choose and of course DS and adoption. Not exactly what I wanted to hear to start of the New Year right, but I guess there is still hope right? I had to call DH at work to tell him the news...he sounded awful. I have been so depressed the last week or so and this just seems to put the icing on the cake. What can anyone tell me about TESE? Is it worth it? The doctor told me there is something like a 20-30% chance of finding sperm. What the h. e. double hocky sticks do we do now? And, how do I keep DH feeling okay when I too feel like the world is crumbling down around us?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Melissa,
I'm so sorry the results came back "normal" on the bloodwork. As for what next - has he seen someone who is a specialist in urology/male issues? Our RE wasn't qualified enough so we went to the big local hospital with a specialist. My husband started with NOA, and NOTHING found on the biopsies and mapping procedures. But, his doctor thought there might be varicoceles, and did the surgery to fix them. A year later, and we found 20-30 sperm per sample. It took a while, but we now have enough for IVF with ICSI.

I'm not sure what area you live in, but I'm happy to share our doctor's informaiton if you like (we're in Northern Ca).

Regarding the emotional side of things, I just really encourage you both to work through this together, maybe with counseling. My and my husband had a really hard time, he felt so terrible and I felt bad making him feel "guilty" when I was upset. So we started to grow apart for a while. For him, he needed to go through all the possibilities (surgery, IVF, etc.) before considering DS or adoption. But, everyone is different and many couples decide to move forward is various ways. Just be sure you are both OK with the decisions.

I'm so sorry. Sometimes when I read your posts I feel like I'm reading my own posts from several years ago, so my heart goes out to you. Let me know if you want to talk more!

Leslee said...

I'm sorry about this latest blow.

Same thing happened with me and my husband that itsazoo described. We grew apart so subtly and took a lot of work to get close again.

My best advice for working through this is to let your husband know that you are available to talk whenever he is. He might not be ready to talk just yet, but knowing that you're ready whenever he is will help.

As far as the TESA surgery, my husband had it first done by an urologist that was relatively inexperienced at doing the surgery, just to make sure there was something there. It was pretty bad, a lot worse than he thought it would be. It took him a month before he wasn't wincing in pain. Second time was with the RE who was very experienced, and he was better within a week. Thing is in this situation, and we didn't learn this until after we tried IVF, the embryos made with TESE sperm sometimes are lower quality. We had 14 eggs, 2 "good," the rest "poor," and only 5 total were transferred in all. I was 24 and the eggs looked great. If I could go back, I'd still do the TESE, but would use our donor for 50% of the eggs, just in case the others didn't look as good. But, what's that saying about hindsight? We still have the biopsy on ice just in case we win the lottery, but we are currently considering doing IVF with the donor 100% since we've not gotten pg during our many diui cycles.

Sorry for this turning into an "all about me" comment.

Hang in there. This isn't the end.

Leslee
babyattheend blogspot