When we walked back with Dr.Reh she said, "Sorry we keep making you come in so often - especially without even starting the IVF yet!" I told her I didn't mind. In my head I was thinking, "Um, you guys aren't really making me come in - my stupid uterus and crappy ovaries like to cause these frequent visits."
She had us sit down to talk about everything. I had a nice long list of questions. Let's see what I learned...
Midnight Thursday is the cut off for any eating or drinking.
At 11 am on Friday I will check in with Surgery Admissions at the hospital. They'll take me back and start getting me all prepped up and ready to go. Dr.Reh will be performing the hysteroscopy. She'll insert a camera through my cervix, and they'll use surgical instruments to remove the polyps. The polyps will be sent to pathology to check for cancer, though she said the chance of cancer is teeny, like 1%. The surgery will only take about 40 minutes but she said Brian can expect to be in the waiting room longer than that due to the prepping. When the surgery is over, she'll come out to let Brian know that everything went okay. I will be kept a bit longer just to eat some crackers, drink some juice and shake of the anesthesia a bit. If all goes as planned (which I'm sure it will), I should be out around 4 pm.
It'll be Brian's job to stay with me for 24 hours following the surgery; I'm not supposed to be left alone. But we should have the house set up for my night of recovery so that we don't need to leave.
I'm being prescribed painkillers for afterwards to deal with the cramming. I'm also allowed to use heat pads. I'm going to try to stick to heat pads more than the pain killers. For some reason they also said to expect severe shoulder pain - something to do with the anesthesia.
I'm not allowed to drink alcohol for 48 hours after surgery. I'm not allowed to drive 48 hours after surgery. I'm not allowed to lift more than 10 lbs for the 10 days following the surgery. Basically for a couple weeks I'm supposed to take it easy.
Then I have a post op appointment. As long as my body has recovered, 2-3 weeks post op we will begin to do injectables to truly begin the IVF process.
At the end of the appointment I asked Dr.Reh if she thought having the surgery done before the IUIs would've changed the outcome. She said while it's possible that it would have, that most studies and doctors would say that is unlikely. She does not recommend doing another Clomid cycle post surgery. She said while the polyps on my uterus could be adding to my infertility that the true culprit is my inability to ovulate. She said that before IVF, they want every factor to be as perfect as it can be.
She said my surgery is a very open and shut case - which is a true relief. She remains EXTREMELY confident in IVF working for us.
I walked away from the appointment much less anxious about the surgery. Though it was more like wobbling away since today I had a very dizzying blood draw. They seriously had to draw my blood to make sure I'm not pregnant... ha, could've sworn that was an April Fool's joke.
This surgery is just another little bump in the road but it'll be behind us soon enough.
Now I just want to nap off some tiredness and dizziness.
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