The Timeline

Here is an abbreviated version of our last 4 years:

At the start of 2010, we threw all precautions to the wind – no more prevention methods that we learned about in 8^th grade sex ed!!  We were on what we thought was the fun route to pregnancy - “not trying to get pregnant but not trying to prevent it”.  We thought it would be a whimsically fun adventure and it was.  We just happened to be so well practiced at what we learned in 8^th grade that we accidentally became professionals at not getting pregnant.  Ms. Gustafson would be so proud!

2012 came so we thought we should really start trying if we were going to add another Toomey to the family.  So the next exciting adventure of peeing on sticks, charting my temperature as though global warming depended on it, sprinting to the doctor’s office with sperm samples in pockets, eating/drinking dirt & voodoo visits engulfed us for the next year.  Although all of that was extremely fun, no little Toomey decided to join us so we decided to meet with an OB who specialized in infertility.  Our first consultation resulted in scheduling a laparascopic surgery which found & cauterized (burned) most of the endometriosis.  **Note to partners of patients who are about to undergo surgery:  Don’t tell the patient a story as they enter the surgical room about a surgery where the doctors performed the wrong procedure.  I am nost saying this happened, but there’s about a 100% chance that it did.

Ok, so they got all of that icky stuff burned off and we were ready for some reproductive assistance and drugs.  By drugs I mean pills and needles, the kind that make you faint.  There’s about a 100% chance that may have happened as well.  We completed 3 rounds of Clomid/Ovidrel, 2 IUI’s (Intrauterine Insemination) & 1 timed intercourse.  After all of that we were the proud parents of a dog named Harley!  Not exactly what we were shooting for, but Harley is pretty awesome so we will keep him.

Summer came and we needed a break so we made it a super fun one which didn’t include partying with any doctors.  Summer ended, we switched to a new fertility clinic, CRM, whose main gig is IVF.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with IVF and not interested in selecting the hyper link for more info, IVF is the Ironman of infertility treatments.  For ease of description, it is the fertility process often referred to as “Test-tube babies”….that term is NOT super acceptable though so maybe don’t use it in public, or at all.

So, we didn’t do their main gig (IVF), we opted for another round of IUI resulting again in the proud parents of a dog named Harley.  Then I headed to Mankato to meet with an osteopath who helped my Aunt Peg beat lung cancer! Yay!! (By the way, we are all really pumped about her success) So I have been working with the osteopath and nurse to get myself 100% ready for the next step which is now IVF in Colorado at CCRM.

Why Colorado and not Minnesota?

1. Well, if you know anything about use, we pretty much throw ourselves on a plane every chance we get
2. Success statistics
3. Escaping work – we are surrounded by our jobs at home and by going to Colorado we think it will be easier to stay relaxed and have fun.  We are going to treat it as a vacation minus the beach and minus extreme supports.

If you ask me today what our plan is I would say:  “We are doing 1 round of IVF and hopefully it takes, or we will be stealing a baby.”  The stealing babies part is of course a joke.

If you asked my yesterday morning what our plan is, I would have said: “I am thinking of quitting all together and adopting 100 dogs.”

If you asked me yesterday afternoon what our plan is when I was enjoying how entertaining and funny my nieces and nephews are, I would have told you:  “Of course we going to do IVF because if my siblings can make kids that awesome, just imagine how ours will turn out”.