An Insemination "Date"

The IUI process is interesting to me. It has all the components of a natural way to conceive just in a mixed up order. (And yes. That is a picture of sperm swimming toward an egg. You are welcome.)

Let's say you're a normal person setting out on your trying to conceive journey. You might plan a big date night when you know your ovulating, perhaps go to dinner,have some drinks to relax and then head home and get it on. So bottom line there's a meal and some hopeful ejaculation involved, but not at the same time. After your done banging it out you'll probably lay and cuddle and talk for a bit about your hopes and dreams and cross your fingers that it worked and you'll be pregnant in 14 days. This would be the optimal outcome.

Now let's say you're an infertile person or someone who's struggling to conceive and are now under the care of an RE. You opt to do a medicated back to back IUI. You start your period- which sucks because that means that you didn't conceive last month. You go to the RE on cycle day 3 when you're still bleeding like a stuck pig which is reason enough for no one to go near your lady bits.However the doctor wants you to come in so they can draw blood from your arm and have you get the dildo wand vag-cam ultrasound up your vag while you're still heavily bleeding from your period. How lovely.

So after the nurses hose down (not really) the mess you've made in their ultrasound room they call you to tell you to start your injectible fertility med shots that night. But wait- your insurance company (CVS Caremark) has fucked you over and they would like to take 10 business days to mail your medicine even when they know you need to start taking it tonight. So you cry calling around to several pharmacies and no one carries your shots. So then you call the doctors office back crying, they take pitty on you and give you leftover shots that have been donated to them by patients no longer cycling and tell you to bring in the meds CVS will mail you after it's all too late. You'd also we crying because you're paying thousands of dollars out of pocket for this medication.

After you've done your injections for 8-12 days with doctors visits for trans vaginal ultrasounds and blood work every other day, you might finally have some mature enough eggs (16-22mm) and the RN announces you can take your Ovidrel trigger shot tonight (to induce ovulation). At this point you've paid hundreds of dollars for the blood work (not too expensive) and ultrasounds ($200-300 a pop)

The next morning you and your partner/spouse would come into the clinic sometimes as early as 7am. Our first IUI's mostly ended up being on the weekends (Costs $80 extra) so it was nice to be able to take it easy for the rest of the day when we had to be up so early out an about to the clinic on a Saturday morning. The spouse goes in first to an exam room and does their thing to generate the sample. Then you can leave and go out to breakfast at a nice cafe and have the whole place to ourselves while the sample is prepared. Preparing the sample entails putting it through a "wash" to get rid of the sperm with 2 heads, the ones that don't swim or the ones that swim sideways. The finished product you end up with super concentrated with only the best of the best swimmers.

You come back in 1.5 hours to be inseminated. They invite you into the exam room where you put your feet in the stirrups, then they insert a speculum. Once the speculum is in (the worst part in my opinion) they then insert a catheter full of the concentrated swimmers just inside the uterus and inject the "baby batter". All that in less than 3 minutes. Then they remove the speculum, flip something on the table to make your hips elevate so your womb is tilted back to give the sperm an advantage. They cover you up with the paper sheet, turn the lights down low, turn on some relaxing music and set a time for 10 minutes. They then go fetch your spouse from the waiting room to come in and wait with you.

During the 10 minute "afterglow" as we called it. We'd hold hands and say a prayer hoping this would be "the one" and then we'd talk about what we had to do that day, or tell a joke. The timer would ring and I'd get dressed and we'd head out to the front desk. We'd pay our $700 (for two IUIs) and some odd dollars and go about our business, until tomorrow, when we do it ALL over again, because these are back to back IUIs. It's basically a chance to douse the shit out of your eggs with two batches of super concentrated swimmers.

Then you'd go home and wait for 14 days. If you're anything like me, on the 14th day just as you'd convinced yourself that "this has to be it!!" you'll go to the bathroom and discover you bitch period waited until the very last second to show her stupid head and you just wasted $1,500. Usually I had medicine left over- enough to get me through another IUI so in total our 4 attempts cost us almost $8,000, but hey like I said at the beginning- at least I got "laid" and didn't have to do any of the work. I also got a couple meals out if it!