Is 7 the magic number?

I asked the doctor the big question at my scan on Thursday. How many tries do we get? He gave me a somewhat unclear answer. "Usually we do 3 rounds of oral meds, then 3 rounds of oral meds combined with injectables, then if we're still unsuccessful we do 1 round of injectables before moving on to IVF. So usually we'll do up to 7 IUIs. You've skipped some steps though. Well, there isn't any reason why this shouldn't work for you, but why don't we go ahead and put you on the waiting list for IVF just as a backup plan. The list is up to August of '08 already. I'm going to do that now before I forget and you can go pick up your meds. Oh, and make sure you come back Tuesday for labs." That's basically the way it went down. So I go to get dressed and pick up my meds and start thinking about it. Usually they will do up to 7 IUI's. But only 1 round of injectables. I had 1 IUI with just oral meds (Femara), 1 with a combo of oral meds and injectables (Femara and Gonal-F), then we went to straight injectables because of my poor response to oral meds and past luck with injectables. So we've only had 3 of our 7 IUIs, but we're going on our second round of injectables. So I'm a little unsure as to whether or not we will still get 7 IUIs before having to go to IVF. Obviously we have already broken protocol so does that mean they will continue to break protocol or does that mean they may cut me off at any point here? Could this be our last chance with IUI? I'm trying not to think about it, but the thought keeps creeping into my head. What if this is our last chance? What if it doesn't work?

We haven't given IVF a lot of thought, but our initial response was that we probably wouldn't do it. I definitely need to research it more and find out what is involved in an IVF cycle because when I expressed concern over the amount of time involved and not being able to make multiple appointments a week, etc, which I thought was necessary with IVF, the doc told me that there really isn't much more involved than what I'm doing right now. I usually go in 4 times each cycle including the day of the IUI itself. He said there'd probably only be one extra appointment needed for an IVF cycle. I can do that! But we will have to pay part of it out of pocket and the hubby isn't too keen on that. Granted, it's minimal compared to what others have to pay, but when there are no guarantees it's tough to decide what to do. If we didn't have our wonderful daughter I would do it in a heartbeat. Pay any amount. But I'm just not sure how far we should go to pursue this now. We obviously want another child very much and would love to give our daughter a sibling (and boy would she love it too, you should hear her!), but at what expense? At what point do we decide that it's just not meant to be?

It's not fair that we have to even think about these things! It should be as simple as saying "Gee, I think the times about right to give bugaboo a brother or sister. If we start trying now we should be pregnant by the end of the year." Wham bam thank you ma'am a handful of times and it's done. Not this crap of "Gee, how many needle pokes and hormone variations can my body handle; do we have time to squeeze a cycle in this month between business trips; will hubby be able to take time off work again and again to watch bugaboo while I go to appointments; how much money can we scrape together if we live on mac'n cheese for the rest of the year so we can do IVF?" This is such total bull$hit and I would love to know why this happens to us. Why were we the ones chosen by God to go through this? I think I'm going to devote a post to this subject soon. A why me post. Because damn do I ask that question a lot.